Johannes Schult

Perhaps the most magnificent element of the Chris de Burgh concert in Mannheim last Tuesday was the perfect sound mix. Unlike most live concerts, it wasn’t too loud. The vocals were crystal clear, the bass present but never obnoxious, the drums a piece of the puzzle instead of a bulldozer driving all across the puzzle. The acoustics of the Mozartsaal certainly helped transporting the sound to the audience’s ears. The light show was inventive but again never distracting from the actual star of the show: the music. Sure, some fans might indulge in seeing Chris de Burgh. I, however, was there for the music. Once again, the setlist (see below for pic and details) contained a balanced mixture of old and new material. There were plenty of songs that hadn’t been played for many years; there were the inevitable classics; there were seven songs off the new album “The Hands of Man” – some great (like “Where Would I Be?”), the rest at least good; there were other songs that were neither classics nor obscurities – “Where Peaceful Waters Flow”, “The Spirit of Man”, “The Same Sun”.

The mood was good on stage as well as in front of the stage. In addition to the usual presents (flowers, wine) Chris also got tomato soup. The first few songs were presented without comment. Later on, the banter between songs grew longer. It was generally filled with thankfulness and a bit of wit. In my opinion, the only flaw was the use of click tracks and samples during some of the band songs. Don’t get me wrong, “Go Where Your Heart Believes” sounded brilliant with those strings. It just made the show seem a bit like a TV show rather than a live show. I’m sure the band could have easily played the songs without additional help. I still enjoyed the songs, of course, even with the diminished tempo dynamics. As for the highlights, there were plenty.

“Transmission Ends” was wonderful, “Say Goodbye to It All” made me cry, the acoustic session proved that the players on stage don’t need to rely on backing tracks. And the solo section with “Carry Me”, “Borderline”, and “Where Peaceful Waters Flow” demonstrated that Chris de Burgh is still very much an amazing singer, musician, and performer. Then there was the cheesy synth sound in “Man on the Line” (awesome!). “Spanish Train” and “A Spaceman Came Travelling” were a blast from the past that got lots of applause. And for the encore, “Patricia the Stripper” made an (acoustic) appearance!

This was my fourth Chris de Burgh concert. Once again, the Irish singer delivered a fresh performance with just a few inevitable repetitions (which, by the way, haven’t lost any of their appeal – “don’t do it!”). And not only did he cover most periods of his career, the fans embraced pretty much every song with equal appreciation. The “cost” of this is probably a slightly smaller audience (the hall was pretty much sold out with maybe 1,700 people) compared with the draw of a pure best of program. The ticket prices were rather steep, so you certainly won’t find me at another concert of the current tour. Yet, from a musical and emotional perspective, it was an excellent show, sincere, uplifting, thoughtful, moving, and towards the end even rocking.

1. The Hands of Man
2. Big City Sundays
3. The Light on the Bay
4. Have a Care
5. Go Where Your Heart Believes
6. The Candlestick
7. Ship to Shore
8. The Same Sun
9. Spanish Train
10. Through These Eyes
11. Transmission Ends
12. A Spaceman Came Travelling
13. Man on the Line
14. Missing You (acoustic)
15. Pure Joy (acoustic)
16. Love of the Heart Divine (acoustic)
17. There Goes My Heart Again (acoustic)
18. Carry Me (Like a Fire in Your Heart)
19. Borderline
20. Where Peaceful Waters Flow
21. Where Would I Be?
22. The Words “I Love You”
23. The Keeper of the Keys
24. The Lady in Red
25. Africa
26. The Spirit of Man
27. Say Goodbye to It All
28. Don’t Pay the Ferryman
29. High on Emotion
30. Patricia the Stripper
31. The Moonfleet Finale

This song developed over a couple of days, which I thankfully had at my hands. The chorus came first. Then what? It made me think of Shania Twain’s marijuana experience, which she described in her autobiography: “I mean, it did make me dizzy and giddy, but at that age, so did having a good laugh over an unexpected, loud fart.” (p. 94)

Once I had the chords and the melody, I wasn’t sure what rhythm to use. I could have turned it into a fun 4/4 punk song. The acoustic approach makes the lyrics stand out, though. I think. After a few video-less weeks, I also made a video. Hopefully, the next video will feature not just the lower half of my face. The final chorus should be “some do it quietly”, right? But hey, I’m a German. I’m ignorant of adverbs. Ha! (Sorry.)

#21 Everybody Farts

Hillary Clinton, Prince Charles, the Pope, and the King of Spain
The husband of Natalie Portman, your mum and Shania Twain
Everybody farts
Everybody farts
From time to time
No, it is no crime
Everybody farts

Jonathan Coulton, Tom Cruise, and Angela Merkel, too
Your significant other, and sometimes even you
Everybody farts
Everybody farts
Some do it quiet
Some cause a riot
Yes, everybody farts

(words and music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

Schon wieder ein instrumentales Stück. Diesmal gibt es Heavy Metal. Den Titel hat sich sicher schon mal eine andere Band ausgedacht, weshalb ich jetzt gar nicht nachschaue. Die Musik hatte ich bereits vor einem Monat geschrieben, doch erst heute endlich mal aufgenommen.

#20 Metalodic

(music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

This happens when I’m in the mood of writing a punk song about heavy metal. I tried several angles until I found that focusing on one year and leaving out band names actually works, sort of. The lyrics are not a comprehensive list of 1988 in metal (which was a good one if you ask me), but it covers my favourite albums along with a bunch of stuff that’s at least okay.

#19 1988

There was “No Place for Disgrace” and “Blessed Is the Black”
And the “Perfect Man” really didn’t sound too bad
“The Keeper of the Seven Keys” got a second part
And “Battalions of Fear” was a promising start
In 1988
In 1988

“No Exit” was ambiguous, but “Leprosy” was cool
With a heart of steel the “Kings of Metal” did rule
There was “The Morning After” in Germany
And a comeback in the States entitled “Thundersteel”
In 1988
In 1988

“Operation: Mindcrime” was deservedly a hit
“Irae Melanox” remained an insider tip
The keyboards of a “7th Son” reminded me of cheese
“Port Royal” was a masterpiece
In 1988
In 1988

(words and music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

Auch diese Woche gibt es ein instrumentales Stück. Wie so oft, bekam es erst einen Titel, als ich die Datei abschließend gespeichert habe. Eine andere Idee, die ich diese Woche nicht in ein ganzes Lied umsetzen konnte, lautete übrigens “Hier kommt die Kartoffelfrau”.

#18 Etwas Gezupfe

(music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

This is a quick folk instrumental tune. The title came about when I set the music to the video.

#17 Gnomes Running Through the Forest

(music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

Scroll down for nice plots! Watch the video here!

This is a summary of the YouTube statistics of videos by the Vlogbrothers – Hank and John Green. The raw data were kindly provided by kitchensink108.tumblr.com. I focus on two dependent variables:

• Who made it? Hank-only, John-only, or both?
• The second variable of interest is the Date. In other words: When was the video put online?

The data set already contains a few interesting variables:

• The view count (Views)
• The number of Likes
• The number of Dislikes
• The number of Comments

The three latter numbers co-vary (all rank correlations > .7) with the total number of views, so looking at them all separately would be repetitive and boring. So instead I will look at:

• The view count – most of the time I’ll plot the natural logarithm of the view count because of a few outliers (more on those later)
• The Likes per View ratio (overall appreciation)
• The Likes per Dislike ratio (unambiguous appreciation)
• The Comments per View ratio along with the overall number of comments
• The length of the videos is not that interesting because most clock in just under 4 minutes. (NB: Longer videos were not included in the original data set.) There is just not enough variation. So I’ll just have one quick plot at the end.

Speaking of plots, most of the analysis will be graphical. This is pretty much a census, so there’s no need for statistical testing. Also, it’s all quite exploratory.

Here we go: Who tends to have more Views?

Here is the median view count for each brother: Hank: 256k, John: 286k, both: 347k. This means that 50% of Hank’s videos have more than 256k views, and the other half of his videos have less than 256k views. So John’s videos tend to get more views, but still less than reunion videos. You can also look at the means (M) and standard deviations (SD) – but there are some influential outliers that impede the interpretation of the numbers (Hank: M = 378k (SD = 537k); John: M =467k (SD = 1112k); both: M =367k (SD = 183k)).

This plot shows the view count changes across time. The solid line is a median band. It indicates how many views a video needs at a given point in time to have less views than half of the other videos.

Each gray point represents one particular Vlogbrothers video. When I add the linear trend (actually, it’s a log-linear trend), it becomes clear that newer videos tend to get more views:

And this is the same plot with some additional Nerdfighter-related dates:

Did the movie version of The Fault in Our Stars lead to fewer views? I don’t think so – this is mostly speculation, anyway. There could be many reasons why Nerdfighters might be watching fewer videos (CrashCourse, SciShow, Tumblr, jobs, kids). Personally, I think that the more recent videos just haven’t accumulated as many views from new nerdfighters who go through old videos (and from random strangers).

Here is another version of this plot, this time with separate lines for John and Hank:

My interpretation would be that the view counts of Hank and John didn’t really develop differently.

So far, so good. Now what about actual appreciation? When I look at the median values for Likes per View, Hank’s videos are liked by 2.3% of viewers. John’s videos are liked by 2.2% of viewers. Reunion videos are liked by 3.3%; Nerdfighters seem to like reunion videos!

Here’s the longitudinal perspective – again no clear differences between Hank’s videos and John’s videos:

Being liked is one thing. But how about the Likes per Dislike ratio? Here are the median values: Hank’s videos tend to get 78 Likes per Dislike. John’s videos tend to get 126 Likes for each Dislike. And reunion videos trumps them both with a median of 177 Likes per Dislike. Here’s the longitudinal perspective:

There were even more Likes than Dislikes during the past few years. This development occurred especially for John’s videos.

Enough with the appreciation – how about Comments? An eternal source of love, hate, fun, and chaos they are. The overall tendency (i.e., median) is that 0.5%-0.6% of viewers write a comment. Let’s look at the longitudinal perspective of Comments/Views:

The number of Comments per View has declined over the past two years; possibly due to the integration of Google+ and YouTube or the new sorting algortihm for comments.

Finally, here’s a quick overview of specific types of outliers. Videos that elicit a lot of comments are mostly about the Project for Awesome:

The videos with the highest view count all deal with animals:

The last couple of plots brings us back to the length of the videos. Here are the titles of the shorter videos.

Not much to say here. And it seems as if Hank keeps making slightly longer videos than John:

That’s all. DFTBA!

PS a day later: I turned this post into a video. The initial text along with the analysis commands are listed in this Stata do-file.

Dies ist ein Lied aus dem Archiv, wie Kenner vermutlich anhand des Videos erkennen. Vor langer Zeit schrieb ich ein Lied mit dem Titel “Hugging Frogs”. Irgendwie kam ich auf die Idee, den Titel zu übersetzen und ein neues Lied (mit komplett anderem Text) daraus zu machen. Ich möchte damit gar nicht alle Pärchen, die öffentlich Zärtlichkeiten austauschen, anklagen. Es gibt nur manchmal diese Mischung aus Speichel und Amphibiengeräuschen, bei der ich an Frösche denken muss.

#16 Frösche

Ich weiß, eure Liebe ist neu und ihr mögt einander sehr
Ich weiß, eure Liebe ist toll und ich sollte mich nicht beschweren
Doch immer, wenn ihr in der Öffentlichkeit seid
Treibt ihr es für meinen Geschmack ein bisschen zu weit
Denn wenn ihr euch küsst, ist das fast so erotisch wie Frösche, die sich umarmen
Wenn ihr euch küsst, ist das fast so erotisch wie Frösche, die sich umarmen

(words and music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

This song was put together in a hurry. I had big plans but not nearly enough time. I wanted to make two songs, a funny one with lyrics and a moody instrumental – one would have been put on the left stereo channel, the other on the right stereo channel. I had no idea how to write such a thing, which was the first obstacle. Then, I failed to come up with any lyrics beyond two simple lines. Yep, the ones that are repeated below. Saturday came and went, Sunday came and I used the final hours of the evening to commit this recording, making up the song on the fly.

#15 Cleaning

It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it
It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it
It’s a dirty job but it pays the bills
Cleaning gravestones at Père Lachaise
But when the next of kin do not pay it slowly turns into a mess

Rest in peace while leaves fall on your grave
Rest in peace while birds shit on your grave
Rest in peace while tourists bring you flowers
Cleaning gravestones at Père Lachaise
But when the next of kin do not pay it slowly turns into a mess

(words and music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

This song happened after I listened to the pre-Creedence Clearwater Revival recordings of Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets. I wrote an instrumental song with lots of reverb on the lead guitar; after all, my vocals don’t suit the early 60s pop music style. The video has a different lead guitar track as I re-recorded it while filming. The title has no particular meaning. I just liked it.

PS: Since I installed a podcasting plugin, there are additional (albeit broken) links at the end of each old 52-second song post. Please ignore them.

#14 Arlington Afternoon

(music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)