Hi everyone,

I’d like to apologize for the emails that were not attended to in the last few months. The gabriella (underscore) robin (at) yahoo (dot) com email is rarely attended to since I’m very busy with work and with maintaining the site at another domain.

To speed up communication, in order of decreasing importance, contact me through these means:

1) Comments in this blog
2) Replies to the YKDB Gabriela Site thread
3) Email to mike (underscore) s (underscore) 6 (at) yahoo (dot) com

See everyone around!

First and foremost, “CM” means “Commercials” in Japan. This post is made for people who think that the Grand Funk Inc.’s official website bites.

To start off, please visit http://grandfunk.net. You will see this screen:

click the image to enlarge

There are 4 main sections in the website: The CM Music, the Artists, the CDs, and the Movies section.

Now click the “CM Music” section, and you will be brought to this page:

click the image to enlarge

At the top of the page, you will see the navigation pane, containing the four main sections of the website: CM Music, CD, Artists, and Movie OSTs. Below that, you will see a horizontal line with the heading “Archives”. And the big box at the bottom left is the list of the most recently published CMs of the studio. You could click one of those images, and you will see the detailed view at the right side.

Now, let’s head over to the older published CMs of Grand Funk. (more…)

Two of the most requested unreleased songs from the original Gabriela Robin website are the “Heaven’s Not Enough - Gabriela Robin version” and the one named “Cheza’s Song/Lunar Flower Lullaby”, both from the anime Wolf’s Rain. The scene where Heaven’s Not Enough with the voice allegedly owned by Gabriela was enchanting. I actually replayed that part again and again. Same goes with “Track 15″ in another episode.

So if you guys haven’t downloaded them before, then they’re here once more. The person who ripped the tracks are not credited in the download, but the person who showed it to me is djsilt from YKDB. If the person who ripped it sees this and would like to be credited, please notify me.

I also added some tracks that I ripped myself: (more…)

“Kanno made music for Microsoft?!”

Among the numerous commercial music that Yoko Kanno has made, Microsoft seems to be the most intriguing. It’s not because the music is grand, but the company is ubiquitous, highly profitable, controversial, whatever.

Before eyebrows raise, I think we could also list other big-name international companies who commissioned Kanno to do the music for their ads. Let’s start with IBM, Sony, Canon, Master Card (Priceless!), Sharp, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Coca-Cola, among many others. I have 122 advertisement song samples in my computer, and that doesn’t even cover all of her work for ads. I only have the ones that are published in Grand Funk. Kanno should have an official homepage that has news about everything she does *sigh*.

Watch the ad: 300K 1M
Click the image to go to the Microsoft Ads Website.

Lots of good-looking people on that ad who use Microsoft, don’t you think?

Now let’s move on to other ads with Kanno’s compositions that I’d like to share with everyone: (more…)

Year 2005, the YKDB Forum was born, and the community was buzzing with members who have a newly found niche to express their love for Yoko Kanno. After finding out that there are so many musicians and artists in the forum, I decided do some sort of karaoke game where we virtually pass the mic from one forumer to another.

I chose this song because it doesn’t need any vocal gymnastics. Anyone, even preschoolers could learn this song. Even so, since not all members were singers anyway, this could be a “How to Trainwreck a Kanno/Gabriela Song”. But to be fair, most of the singers who volunteered could really, really sing. Take for example Goliath, previously featured in this blog as one really talented singer who loves to sing Kanno songs, sings in this montage.

Before you listen to this, it might be of note that the singers come from 4 different continents: North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The internet works wonders.

The singers to this song are Goliath, Connor, Roger, Mike6 (that’s me), Blackmago. I hope I didn’t miss anybody

I mixed this song using Adobe Audition which involved (more…)