The Groove Music Life

AKB48′s self-played performance of their forthcoming single “Give Me Five” under the assumed name/side project Baby Blossom is getting a lot of attention in the J-Pop blogosphere. Despite the raw playing and the questionable sound reinforcement (the result of either no proper soundcheck the day of the performance, or the soundman not taking into consideration how different the room was going to sound with an audience full of people as compared to when the only people in the building were AKB48 and their road crew), they still made quite an impression on me. As someone that has been playing a variety of instruments his whole life, I definitely want to critique and give some serious suggestions to the girls because there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For those that don’t know, I’m a trained musician. I play several different instruments (guitar is my main one, and I presently own five that are all named after J-Pop singers) and there’s a bunch more that I’ve tried but could never get a good enough handle on (trying to teach myself alto sax at age 19 resulted in way too many references to Horatio Hornblower and goat calling from my otherwise supportive parental units) and I’ve played in several different bands for over a decade after my graduation for high school – in fact, it ended up being my main income during the waning years of Reagan America when the only other place that was offering steady employment was the Armed Forces (who had already turned me off when they were relentlessly trying to recruit myself and my other classmates during my junior and senior years of high school and then for months afterward). It’s this musical background that has been a blessing to my activities as a writer and blogger, especially since, as essential brother Ray Mescallado said once, I “aspire to quality music writing” (one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten on my work – thanks again, man.)

Anyway, having watched and listened to the live performance of the song, here’s my notes:

The four girls playing horns were basically the weakest link in the chain. With only a few months of experience on their instruments, they sounded not much different than the brass players in your average junior high or high school marching band. That having been said, brass and woodwind instruments are not the easiest instruments to learn. I attempted to learn trumpet in 6th grade, as well as my aforementioned attempt to try alto sax almost a decade later, and only realized one thing – I didn’t have the lung power to get away with playing a horn properly.

The keyboardists and percussionists involved were a bit inaudible, but I blame the soundman for that, and in all fairness, I won’t critique them.

Yuki Kashwagi did a very impressive job behind the drum kit – I don’t think she even missed a beat. If she found herself in a working rock band after graduating AKB48, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Minami Takahashi did fine playing lead guitar, but her silence for the last few bars of the second chorus before the solo was typical of the beginner. There was a couple of obvious missed notes, but the only thing that grated on me with her playing was her rather bizarre and uncomfortable/unnatural-looking left hand fretting technique. Continued woodshedding and a bit of study with some good guitar instructional videos would help tremendously – they certainly did when I picked the guitar back up after a couple of years of hardly touching it!

Yuko Oshima fluctuated a couple of times on bass but she held her own very well, while Atsuko Maeda showed a lot of confidence playing rhythm guitar.

It’s being openly hoped by AKB48 fans that the AKB48 members involved will continue with this Baby Blossom side project in live performance and maybe even in the studio, and I share those hopes. Quite frankly, it would suck if they stopped playing after pulling off what they did the other night!