Busking Roy Orbison
Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2012 1:58 pm
Want to know how to ruin your throat? Watch this video for all the details.
This is one of those cases where the execution didn't quite live up to the fantasy. At least, not up to the fantasy I had at 5:00 A.M. this morning as I was driving to the gym and heard this song come on the radio. I thought, Hey, that'd make a good busking video! What I discovered is that this song is impossible for me to sing in standard E-to-E tuning, and only slightly less impossible in D-to-D tuning.
Roy Orbison is known primarily for three things: 1) his dark, schmaltzy songs (of which this is a great example); 2) his presence in the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys (he died shortly after the release of their first album); and 3) his acting role in what has to be the worst movie ever made -- "The Fastest Guitar Alive." Get this storyline: a Confederate soldier travels around with his guitar that shoots bullets, and steals gold from the San Francisco mint in order to aid the Confederacy. Trust me, it's worse than it sounds.
Speaking of which, there's my video. You can hear that I was breezing along fairly competently, then started to lose my voice in the last verse. This is one of those cases where I simply couldn't do another take in order to fix my vocal crackup. I had nothing left. In fact, my throat surgeon would be shocked that I even attempted this.
This will not be on my open-mic set list.
PLEASE NOTE: If video was recently uploaded it will not work yet. YouTube will need a little more time to get the video ready. Please check back again soon.
This is one of those cases where the execution didn't quite live up to the fantasy. At least, not up to the fantasy I had at 5:00 A.M. this morning as I was driving to the gym and heard this song come on the radio. I thought, Hey, that'd make a good busking video! What I discovered is that this song is impossible for me to sing in standard E-to-E tuning, and only slightly less impossible in D-to-D tuning.
Roy Orbison is known primarily for three things: 1) his dark, schmaltzy songs (of which this is a great example); 2) his presence in the supergroup The Traveling Wilburys (he died shortly after the release of their first album); and 3) his acting role in what has to be the worst movie ever made -- "The Fastest Guitar Alive." Get this storyline: a Confederate soldier travels around with his guitar that shoots bullets, and steals gold from the San Francisco mint in order to aid the Confederacy. Trust me, it's worse than it sounds.
Speaking of which, there's my video. You can hear that I was breezing along fairly competently, then started to lose my voice in the last verse. This is one of those cases where I simply couldn't do another take in order to fix my vocal crackup. I had nothing left. In fact, my throat surgeon would be shocked that I even attempted this.
This will not be on my open-mic set list.
PLEASE NOTE: If video was recently uploaded it will not work yet. YouTube will need a little more time to get the video ready. Please check back again soon.
