Category Archives: Music
Here are my own compositions, as well as my versions of other peoples’ music.
To Elena – the woman I love
| Playout date: | 2 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – heavy use |
| Location: | Various |
| Other people featured: | My wife, Elena |
| Genre: | Gallery type (based on photographs) |
| Music used: | Okoldovana, ocharovana’ by St Petersburg. Aka “Dragotsennaya ty moya zhenshchina”. |
| Languages used: | Russian |
| Animals featured: | None |
This was my 100th video, and so I wanted to mark it out in a special way, and nothing is more special to me than my wife, and therefore it was a natural thing to do to dedicate this film to her, and to show my viewers a few of the photos I’ve taken of her over the years.
The music playing in the background is one of my wife’s favourite Russian songs, by the group Sankt Peterburg. The song’s title “Dragotsennaya Ty moya zhenshchina” . This means my precious woman, so I thought it was appropriate.
This is a gallery type video intended to showcase photography, but some of these shots were done by friends.
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Snow flurries
| Playout date: | 2 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | my wife, Elena |
| Genre: | Family, Song acapello, minimal intro |
| Music used: | Acapello rendition of ‘Vdol’ po ulitse, aka “Snow flurries” |
| Languages used: | Russian, English |
| Animals featured: | None |
This video was made as a response to Kenbank, one of my first subbers and a good YT friend. Ken had made a video singing the Russian staple “snow flurries”, or “Vdol’ po ulitse metelitsa metyot”, and since on that particular morning, despite it being only 2nd November, we did indeed have snow flurries out on our terrace, I decided to sing the song a cappella, showing an example of snow flurrying, as it were, while I did it!
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#3 Numa Fan muckaround
| Playout date: | 22 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | Sophie |
| Genre: | Family, musical muckaround |
| Music used: | |
| Languages used: | Romanian, English |
| Animals featured: | None |
Early YT legend (and one of my sources) Brookers did a muckaround video called #1 Numa fan, to which someone else called Ognog responded with #2 and this was intended as a response to that, although right now that film has faded into obscurity with only 70 thousand hits to Brookers’ 7 million for the original muckabout, and this one by is only had 700. Leading to the observation that you loose two zeroes off the end whenever you go back one “generation” in spoofing something. Only one in a hundred people actually look at responses, it would seem!
What this all is is part of that whole craze from about 5 years back about the so-called “Numa” song. It was actually “Dragostea din tei” or “Love from the linden trees” by Hajducii, or the Outlaws, a Romanian group who managed to become the Summer hit of the year with this dancey tune. The lyrics to the chorus go “Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma, nu ma iei, nu ma nu ma nu me iei” and the repetition of “nu ma” gave the song its English name. It’s a bit like the Japanese hit Sukiyaki, which received that name as nobody could say “Ue wo muite arukou”.
The chorus in Romanian actually means “You want to leave, but you are not taking me” and the nu ma is ‘Not me’, so that it sounds like the “not me” song.
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Come thou fount of every blessing
| Playout date: | 22 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Hymn |
| Music used: | Cyberhymnal.net’s arrangement of hymn tune “Hyfrydol“ |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
The beautiful hymn by Robert Robinson, this time sung to the tune Hyfrydol.
I did both voices, the melody and the bass part. Can you work out which is the one I’m singing on the video?
An interesting story about this hymn, courtesy of cyberhymnal.org where I also got the midi (this is allowed by them, by the way, as long as you credit, which I am doing)
Robert Robinson had a difficult time with his faith in the latter part of his life, having been converted at 17 and having written this and other hymns as a young man. The story is told of how one day, he encountered a woman who was studying a hymnal, and she asked how he liked the hymn she was humming. In tears, he replied, “Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.”
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A message about homophobes
| Playout date: | 14 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Spoof |
| Music used: | “Promise Me” by Beverly Craven – Karaoke |
| Languages used: | Geordie English |
| Animals featured: | None |
Polish-origin Geordie Peter Paczek (pronounced Poncheck) returns to give us a quick lesson for foreigners learning English.
One of the pitfalls for learners of English is the problem of homophobes in English, Peter says. That’s words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Here is a guide to some of them.
We finish up with a rendition of Beverly Craven’s lovely song “Promise Me”. Don’t miss the comments to this one by clicking through to the YouTube original via the video above – there are some classical ones among the comments to this one!
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We’re not all alone after all
| Playout date: | 11 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Office at ul Jazdow 8a, Warsaw |
| Other people featured: | None, but wife calls. |
| Genre: | Intro’d song |
| Music used: | Rita Coolidge, We’re not alone |
| Languages used: | English, Russian |
| Animals featured: | Fish in tank behind |
You might think that you’re alone In the office in the evening and able to sing a song for your admiring public who put more dislikes than likes in the marks, but that is in fact not the case. There’s always the mobile telephone to contend with. Huli gets caught by the missus whilst attempting an all time favorite by the incomparable Rita Coolidge.
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If I loved you
| Playout date: | 5 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Intro’d song |
| Music used: | If I loved you, karaoke track |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
I decided to sing this because at the time of posting I didn’t really like any of the renditions I saw on YT. Since then I’m happy to say I’ve seen quite a few that I liked and which are certainly better than this. Hence not everyone likes the description to this song – the prevalance of dislikes to likes for this song is probably provoked a bit by my saying that I didn’t like the other ones, but what can I say? At the time it was a fair assessment!
Night Storm over Warsaw
| Playout date: | 6 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Home – 12th floor of building |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Environmental |
| Music used: | Andrey Vinogradov – Kak na Moriul |
| Languages used: | Bialorusian, English |
| Animals featured: | None |
It was a pretty active storm, with plenty of lightning. This year we’ve had several like this, but this was 2006, and back then it was more of a rarity. The hurdy gurdy music by Andrey Vinogradov also attracted a lot of comment over on YT.
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Quanta Squalia – What Big Sharks!
| Playout date: | 21st March 2011 (Made August 2010) |
| Camera: | Creative Vado |
| Post Production: | CyberLink Power Director 8 |
| Location: | Sealife Centre, Great Yarmouth |
| Other people featured: | Sophie |
| Genre: | Zoo and Aquarium showcasing |
| Music used: | Quanta Qualia by Hayley Westenra
 Hayley |
| Languages used: | Russian, Ukrainian |
| Animals featured: | Nurse sharks, zebra shark, reef sharks, green sea turtle, Monodactylus fishes |
A film showing the beauty and intelligence of aquarium sharks. The nurse sharks and zebra shark showcased here are a beautiful thing to observe at close range. These are not dangerous attackers in the main for human swimmers, as you will see that the size and form of the mouth is not similar to that of the notorious great whites, etc. Even these smaller fishes like the monos, and also the sea turtle sharing the aquarium are relatively safe from being attacked by the big sharks. The smaller sharks, the reef sharks, are ironically more risky than the big ones, but they are not really large enough to damage a turtle.
The zebra shark (Stegosoma fasciatum) has a long tail which it uses to thrash through schools of larger fishes to stun or kill by impact and then it can turn and eat what it has hit. The monos here are even too small to be impacted by that, and they fly under the zebra shark’s radar – as long as it is kept well-fed!
Enjoy the pure tones of Hayley Westenra, and my atrocious pun in the title that you need to know Italian to be able to get.
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