Cover Morning Musume & Cover Morning Musume Hello! Project!
Hey guys. So sometimes online I'd see a little information about a couple albums of Hello! Project English language covers from about a decade ago, though not a whole lot of information, and with only a few of its songs to be found on YouTube. So though I generally didn't hear good things about them, eventually I got curious enough I ordered a copy of the album collecting the tracks from both. Now that I have it, I'm doing my bit to share the sort of information online I wish I'd been able to find before.
Yesterday I made a YouTube video with 25 second samples of the tracks originally from the first album centered mostly on Morning Musume, and today did the same for the second which takes from a broader range of Hello! Project groups. Many of…
An attempt at song localization
When I'm listening to a song enough and am either checking out a lyrics page or watching a video with an English translation bolted on, it's not unusual to imagine how the song would sound with those words or something close to them in place. Usually not so well--for a literal translation what's short in one language might be long in another, what's fun rhyming or wordplay in Japanese is totally lost, or sometimes it's already built around a mix of Japanese and English so trying to go all of either way wouldn't work well. How could one really deal with major lines like "Wakuteka Take a chance" or "suki sukissu kisu"? However, for a change when I attempted to do this, it mostly worked out.
Te wo Nigitte Arukitai. Originally a Goto Maki song,…
Database fruition. Introducing DohBell.
Two months ago I decided to make a music database, and a month ago I showed some pictures of its progress. Now, though there is still a lot more to be added, it's in pretty useable form so it's open. DohBell
The front page will link to all the major sections. You can see lists of people/groups, songs, and albums, then click on any of them for more specifics. There's plenty of interconnection, as well as links to outside sites like this one.
Here are some examples of how you can use the options at the top of the list pages to find something a bit more specific.
Songs
Single A-sides with lyrics not by Tsunku (but a lyrics credit for somebody)
Songs with Tsuji Nozomi on vocals but not Kago Ai
S/mileage instrumentals from the year 2010
Albums
All sing…
Hiragana and Katakana
A recommendation for others out there who haven't already: Learn hiragana and katakana.
Much of my entertainment taste leans Japanese, and I've even got a site that compiles Japanese game sales, but I never took the time to try to learn how to read any of it. But I guess I finally got pretty sick of always having to depend on machine translations/transliterations, trying to match data by keeping things in mind like "the short chunk of text that starts with a bent 7 and ends with a one-eyed smiley face", and being completely at a dead end when faced with text that's part of a graphic.
But really the main reason I recommend it is because it might be a lot easier than you think. I just assumed that learning another alphabet (or two) would be mo…
Nearly Ultimate Tables
Have things in my database to the point where on one page it can display everything I'd compiled into my early S/mileage table and then some--though for practical purposes you'd usually want to hide some of these to make it more readable. I don't have the proper search tools built in yet, but I can change a bit of the page code temporarily to make it display a subset as test.
Here's the current nearly-ultimate S/mileage table--I think the only songs I haven't added in yet are the digital-only remixes. This just being a save of the single page, none of the links will work.
Similarly, here are the other two groups I have almost full song lists for, though it doesn't yet include some of their tracks available only on compilation albums.
Nearly ult…