A few more beatails

Hello again,

It has been a few days since my last post and that is mainly due to the fact that busy over here since Sarah needs to finish up her Master thesis and she can't be all super smart when there is a little monster running around the house asking her to play the same YouTube video for the millionth time in a row. 

(WARNING: if you don't want your child to get addicted to the computer, make sure he or she is nowhere near when you play the below)

This is the dreadful video:

Yeah, it's not even moving pictures! Just a still image of Pippi! 

Anyway, you might be thinking: "Mayu, this post has nothing to do with the clever play on words in your title. I was expecting some details on your beat making or something."

And of course you are correct, that was more of a side note I guess. So let's get to the topic of this post: Beats.

I wanted to give you some more info on the whys and the hows of me making beats. First of all, I am a complete beginner in making beats and everything I know I have taught myself by trial and error and looking up stuff on the internet.The first time I got into trying to make beats was probably like 10 years ago with my friend Sören, back in Berlin. We were really into German rap, specifically anything from a guy called Kool Savas and we were inspired by him I guess. Of course we didn't know shit about making music so we got Fruity Loops and started experimenting. I got more into the beat making part whereas Sören stuck to writing raps. We even formed a "crew" called the Beam Brothers Crew, which consisted of Sören, his brother Björn and me. Haha, what a crew that was! We called it the Beam Brothers Crew because back then our drink of preference was Jim Beam whisky. Sooooooooo original, I know.

Anyway, this obviously never got any further than being a hobby and just for fun (I am sure it never will be more), but I do enjoy making music and it was definitely a lot of fun. I even ended up recording a song back then with a beat that I made and lyrics that I wrote. Sören also has a part at the end of the song. Even though the song is pretty bad quality I do feel kind of proud about it just because everything in it was done by us. We recorded it on Sören's PC with a shitty microphone in his basement. We never got to really finish it, because I ended up moving to Costa Rica, but here it is (contains harsh language): 

Rapkannibale feat. Sören - Was Willst Du? (What do you want?)

Now you will most likely not understand much of it since it is mostly German. But there is also some English and Spanish in there in case you speak any of those. If you did understand any of it, you might have noticed that is all pretty immature "I am better than you" stuff with a lot of bad words thrown in. Well, you know, back then we were really into these aggressive rap artists and so I just went with what I knew and liked.  Looking back it makes me smile and brings back cool memories. Oh and "Rapkannibale" is my rap name by the way. But please don't start calling me that in public. :-)

I stopped making beats for many years either because I didn't have a computer set up that could handle the software or because I was less motivated without my crew, or because of a ton of other little reasons. But one day I decided I would try to get back into it. So I got the newest version of FL Studio (which used to be called Fruity Loops back in the day), and just started experimenting. The beat that I posted earlier is the first one I created with this new program and I am actually actively trying to learn how to become better and make them sound more professional. I even asked a guy at work who has some experience with this kind of stuff for his opinion. His name is Hampus. Yes, that is his real name. I don't plan on ever doing this to earn a living of course. It is, and will remain a hobby, but I would like to get better at it, just for myself I guess.

So, I'm not sure any of you even like this kind of music, but even if you don't you at least learned something new about me. Well most of you anyway. Some of you already knew this part of my personal history.

So, do you guys have any hobbies that you really enjoy even though you are not really all that good at them? Let me know in the comments below.

Until next time!

The Pied Piper of Stockholm

Hello again!

So this past Sunday I went to the 1-year birthday party of a friend's daughter. And let me tell ya: 20+ kids in one room can be awesome, frightening, pure chaos and super fun all at the same time! Sarah didn't come since she had some work to do and really deserved (and probably needed) a break from her daughter and her husband. We can both be pretty annoying at times, but most of the times we are awesome.

For example. Here is Olive being pretty awesome:



Awesome on-command dance moves FTW! (FTW = For The Win, for those non-nerds among you)

Now, I don't know if you knew this, but not only people you know can be awesome (wow, did I just write a sentence with two "know"s and one "knew"? Guess I did). Sometimes, you stumble upon complete strangers that are pretty awesome. And it just so happened that Olive and I ran into an awesome person on subway ride home back from the party. Well at least I thought he was awesome. Opinions will be polarized is my guess.

So, it was this 13 year old kid (I am guessing he was 13, but I'm usually pretty bad at guessing children's ages) who sort of looked like he ran away from home (this is not the awesome part by the way. Olive, please don't run away from home!!!) and was traveling with his 3 pet rats. Yes, three pet rats. As in Rattus rattus. Or maybe they were Rattus norvegicus, but let us not worry about the technicalities. Now, I knew that some of you might think: "OK. Mayu ran out of things to say and is now making shit up!" So I took a picture. I didn't ask him or anything, I just used my super secret spying device, a.k.a. iPhone and pretended to do something on it, while really I was taking a picture. Sneaky, sneaky. I think he didn't notice. At least he didn't send his rat army to attack me. So, if proof is what you want, proof is what you get:

Yeah. There he is. The Pied Piper of Stockholm (minus the pipe).

Not only was he traveling with his awesome herd of pet rats, but he was also wearing a Carlsberg t-shirt. One of my favorite beers and definitely the beer with the most awesome commercials (as you can see here). Yes, even better than the Heineken commercial. At least I think so. If I had to say one negative thing about this kid it would be that that tattoo on his hand was not ready. He just drew it with a pen.

What do you guys think? Are rats awesome or disgusting? Those are the only two options so get off your fence! On a side note, my sister used to have an albino pet rat. Don't let this fact influence your answer though. You can still say rats are disgusting, even if you like my sister.

So I will be ending this post shortly, but I thought I would introduce a recurring "feature" in my blogs: Mayu's Fun Facts. These will be lesser known bits of information that could be useful in very specific situations, but will be completely useless in the vast majority of situations. They may or may not be related to the topic of the post. So here it goes.

Mayu's Fun Fact #1:

Rats cannot sweat. Instead they have to use their hairless tail to regulate their body temperature.

Now, this information will be worthless most of the time. But what if one day you encounter a rat that has been the victim of some kids that were up to no good and they covered their entire tail with tape. If you didn't know this you might not be concerned. How harmful can a bit of tape be? Right? Well, in this specific scenario tape can be deadly! So one day, one very unlikely day but still, Mayu's Fun Fact #1 will safe some poor rat's ass. :-)

Until next time!

Pimp'ed my blog!

Dear blog,

My wife suggested that I start every blog post with "Dear Blog". I am doing it this once, to keep the peace at home, but then it stops. It has to.

Speaking of my wife, I asked her THE question the other day and here is how that went:

Me: "Sarah, will you ever play World of Warcraft?"

Sarah: No. Never. Never. I have more interest in cultivating manure for sale than playing World of Warcraft!"

Those were her exact words. I know, because I wrote them down after she said them. A simple "no" would have sufficed.

Anyway, if you have been here before, you will have noticed that I made some changes to the look of this blog. For once, you will now be able to follow me on Twitter and other social stuff like that, but also, I have added a little music player where I have the current version of the beat I am working on. It is still work in progress and I am, what some might consider a beat making novice, but hey, I just wanted to share it and see what you guys think. Maybe I can incorporate some of your suggestions into it. :-)

Also you can now subscribe to this blog via email, so you can always stay on top of new posts. Only if you want to of course.

Overall I am pretty happy with the new look, but I have noticed that the blog can take a long time to load, so I need to look into this. Did some research and it seems that it might just be one of the shortcomings of Google Blogger so I might look into switching to WordPress. Any of you people out there have experience with WordPress?

If any of you have any suggestions on how I could further improve the blog, that would be much appreciated.

In other news, this has been the shittiest spring ever in Stockholm! Well, I've only been here for two springs, but of those two, this one is definitely the worst! It is almost mid-may and it is still freezing cold! The summers here are already so short, and every day that it stays shit is one less nice day. It sucks!

Before I became a dad it wouldn't have bothered me this much since I could just stay inside if I wanted to. But with a daughter that gets bored of her own home within minutes of being awake, I am forced to go outside. I would be so much more motivated if I didn't have to put Olive in a thousand layers (which she hates!) before being able to go outside.

If I had to put how I feel about this weather in one picture, it would look like this:

Yeah, pretty depressing, right?

I took that picture with a cool app for the iphone called "Hipstamatic". It simulates the effect of using different types of lenses, film and flashes with pretty amazing results. 

So, that is it for this post. 

And remember, every person following me, commenting or subscribing will drastically improve the chances of good weather here in Stockholm!

Until next time!

Do we all become hypocrites eventually?

Hello again!

So I will be turning 30 this year. I guess you could say that is kind of a milestone of some sort. I must say, if 5 years ago someone had asked me where I would see myself in 5 years, I would have never said: "I see myself living in Sweden, working in the gaming industry and with two kids before my 30th birthday." I guess if I had been able to say that I should have used my future-telling skills to look up the lottery numbers or something, but then again, I probably wouldn't have ended where I am right now, and that would have been a shame. I would have had to drown my sorrows about the life that could have been with expensive liquor and wipe my tears with 100 dollar bills. Anyways...

Getting "older" got me to thinking (isn't this how Carry Bradshaw used to start all her columns? OMG, am I turning into a character from Sex and the City!!!??). Do we all turn more and more into hypocrites the older we get?

For example, the other day I was walking home from the subway and walking towards me was a teenager holding his cellphone in his hand and using it as a tiny ghetto blaster, playing some stupid song. For some reason it got me really agitated. I was thinking to myself: "Dude! No one wants to hear your shitty music, coming from your shitty cellphone with shitty speakers! Doing this does not make you cooler! Everyone has cellphones and smart nerds have invented these cool little things you put in your ears, so you can enjoy your music by yourself and not bother every one with it!"

Now you may ask: "How does that make you a hypocrite, I think people that do that are super annoying also!" Well, the things is, I am pretty sure I used to do things that were pretty annoying to "older" folks back when I was a teenager. I mean I didn't have a cellphone that I could play music with back then, but I recall many occasions of drunk bus or train rides that were super fun for us, but probably not so much for the other passengers. I am sure most of you were also annoying as teenagers, at least sometimes. Does that mean I am a hypocrite? Or that we all are? Am I not allowed to get irritated by obnoxious teens without having to buy this mug?

I actually did make an effort to calm down after the music phone incident and try to look at it from a more grown up perspective. I said to myself: "I was also a teen once. I did stupid stuff. That is just how teenagers are." But even after that I was still wishing I had gone up to that teen, grabbed his stupid phone and smashed it on the ground. It's kinda crazy. I wasn't even having a bad day or anything. I just think its stupid to use your phone as a tiny makeshift ghetto blaster! 

Then I thought, if I get so irritated with this stupid stuff some random teen was doing, how will I react when my own kids become teenagers and start doing stupid stuff? But then I remind myself, my kids will be angels and not be some rebellious teens. They will do as they are told and never cause us any grief.

Yeah right. 

Olive threw a giant fit because Sarah didn't lift her onto the computer chair today! That computer chair will soon be replaced with not letting her get married at 16 to some guy she fell in love with at first sight at her friends party.

Olive is 13 months now. Is it too early to start worrying about these kinda things? What do you think? Let me know in the comments section.

Until next time!