A while ago, I had an email chat with Kamal about patience to listen to music. I can’t quote what he said here. However, now I’m pondering on it.

How long should a song be? There’s no exact answer to that. I guess, that will depend on your background and preference. Trained in classical music myself, 5-minute songs are normal. Even a sonata isn’t considered complete if any of the movement is omitted. To listen to all the movements, you need to spend around 15 minutes. However, pop songs are typically much shorter, usually under 4 minutes. Contemporary jazz pieces by Pat Metheny and/or Lyle Mays are usually around 6 minutes, and can span up to 10 minutes, or even an hour. Have you ever attended a whirling dervish ceremony? You will listen to about an hour of music.

Now, what sells well? Songs under 4 minutes. 5 minutes, tops. I just hopped to CD Baby to see the top 10 songs. At time of writing this, they’re around 3 to 4 minutes, with only one exception that spans up to a few seconds more than 5 minutes. I don’t remember having seen a crowd watching Pat Metheny, Mozart players, or a whirling dervish ceremony that is as big as a rock concert. What does this all mean? Have people in general rushed into things, even when listening to music? Have the “skip track” buttons been abused? I hope I’m wrong. I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with patience, but taste instead.

In case you wonder, “ade, are you going to shorten your future music?”, the answer is yes and no. Some of my songs are “long” (whatever that means), and some are “short” (whatever that means). I have no intention to confine the length of my pieces (OK, maybe not two hours). Well, time will tell.

[Photo by flydime.]

I’ve done some significant changes to my website:

1. You can now buy Visions on my website without having to leave my website. Thanks to Audiolife for providing the widget to facilitate the purchase. Don’t worry. Your transactions there are secured by VeriSign. And you can also help me spread my music. Just select “Share Widget” and post it everywhere.
2. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. Yup, a photo gallery.

Enjoy!

Get it while it’s hot! AllAboutJazz.com feature Download of the Day for 16 August 2009: Birth of Love.

I’ve heard many positive reviews on Bandcamp, and I’ve decided to put Visions for sale there. “Is it just another place to put your music?”, you might ask me. My answer is: Well, yes, but there are features that will excite you:

• Name your own price. You can buy my music digitally at a price lower than the average, but I won’t prevent you to pay even higher! You know, I’ve sold a few copies of my CD where I actually offered a discounted price yet the buyer insisted on paying higher than the normal price. But on the other hand, probably my music has been sold at a price where some people can’t afford. So, you can go there to buy at a lower price. Oh, by the way, Birth of Love and Morning Vision can be downloaded at $0.00!
• Try before you buy. By that, you can listen to streams of full tracks before deciding to buy. That’s right. Not 30-second clips.
• Multiple choices of formats. If you’re an audiophile, you can now buy music there in a top-quality format (as of now, FLAC and Apple Lossless are offered). If you’re happy with MP3, as of now, it’s offered in various quality levels.

If you have a Flash browser plug-in installed, you should be able to see the following Bandcamp preview:

Or, you can just go directly to Visions on Bandcamp. Enjoy!

I was trying using the new Google Search functionality I recently put in this blog. I put "jonah's lullaby" as a search term (with all the quotes as I intended it to be a phrase search), and got a link to my post about Jonah’s Lullaby that I wrote recently as the top answer.

Out of interest, I tried using the “Web Search” option, and oooh… There have been many songs with the same title (or are they just covers? I haven’t listened to them. Maybe I will if I have time later). Oh well, that’s alright. For me, title uniqueness and SEO aren’t factors that I decide to call my compositions. I’d rather use titles that reflect my experience or feeling, or facts, or something like that.

There are events in your life that take you to a higher level, in which you feel extraordinarily elated. It may be something that only happens once, or perhaps only rarely.

Early last week, my second child was born. Touching him, putting him on my hands, and looking at his peaceful angelic face really moved me so much that I instantly wrote and sang a lullaby for him. It’s called Jonah’s Lullaby. To be quite frank, I’ve extended the song to be longer than the original one I sang for my boy. I haven’t recorded it. If I record it, I hope I’ll be able to share it with you.

Update: I’ve recorded a portion of the song at my home using a cheapie MP3 recorder. So, please excuse the poor recording quality. [Download MP3]