This is a changelog to keep track of what is done in each update. ------------------ 2020/08/07 ------------------ Rebecca Sugar dropped the full version of "Change Your Mind" after $50,000 was raised for @NationalBailOut. The video made it easy to get the chords, so... surprise update! ------------------ 2020/06/01 ------------------ So... since Steven Universe is over (isn't it?), this is probably the last major update. Wow. It's been a wonderful and unexpected ride as a viewer, as a ukulele player, and as a fan website maintainer. Thank you for sharing the journey with me and I hope you enjoyed the ride too! Sorry that this update is considerably delayed. I was actually on top of things and was more than halfway done with the Steven Universe Movie songs a week after the movie released. Unfortunately, my hard drive died and I lost most of the work I'd done on that soundtrack along with all my motivation. Once again, your kind emails drove me to finally finish up this website. In addition to the songs, I added mouseover chord diagrams. The chords from this batch are tougher and the songs are much longer, so I hope this helps. - Added 'Crying Breakfast Friends' - Added 'The Tale of Steven' - Added 'Let Us Adore You' - Added 'Happily Ever After' - Added 'Other Friends' - Added 'system/BOOT.pearl_final(3).Info' - Added 'Who We Are' - Added 'Isn't It Love' - Added 'No Matter What' - Added 'Disobedient' - Added 'Independent Together' - Added 'Drift Away' - Added 'Found' - Added 'True Kinda Love' - Added 'Change' - Added 'Let Us Adore You (Reprise)' - Added 'Finale' - Added 'Finale (Concept)' - Added 'Tidying Song' - Added 'Shining Through' - Added 'Looking Forward' - Added 'I'd Rather Be' - Added 'Mr. Universe' - Added 'My Little Reason Why' - Added 'Steven Universe Future' - Added 'Being Human' Being the last major update and all, I wanted to take some time to pontificate and reminisce. Steven Universe premiered seven years ago and I followed it since the first episode. Technically even before the first episode since I started following Rebecca Sugar's blog on Tumblr while she was working on Adventure Time. I was really hyped after she announced she would be running her own show. I was even more hyped when I found out that Aivi and Surasshu, two of the few musicians I followed, were also on board. So Steven Universe premiered. I liked the pilot... but to be really honest, I thought the actual show was kind of mediocre. The art wasn't as nice as the pilot (which makes sense, the budget for a series is different) and the stories weren't as interesting to me. But I loved all the behind-the-scenes looks the crewniverse gave (the food parties seemed especially fun) and I really, really loved the music. The first episode I geniunely liked was Bubble Buddies, where Connie was introduced. And eventually Jail Break happened. Like many other fans, that's the episode where Steven Universe became great for me and where I became invested in more than just the music (although to be fair music was even my favorite part about Jail Break.) I really like the soul of the series. It's very mindful and inclusive with a very positive and hopeful vibe. When I had my own kids, I really appreciated that Steven won his battles through making the villains his friends rather than punching them into submission and locking them away forever. I'm really glad a show like this existed for my kids (and I'm glad they enjoy watching it.) While Steven Universe's hiatuses were frustrating, it allowed it to thread itself through a big chunk of my life. I have a lot of good memories built around the show. I pored over the internet looking for information, bonded with friends over the show, went to an Aivi and Surasshu performance, and attended three of the Comic Con panels. The musical panel was especially awesome. My brother and I got in line at 4AM. We chatted with other fans, collected fanzines (some were even by people working on the show), and got lots of sketches of characters riding trains for my son. My favorite part of Steven Universe is the music. My parents exposed my siblings and I to a lot of broadway and cartoon musicals while I was growing up and, for me, Steven Universe is a continuation of that form of music. I eagerly waited after every convention to see if Rebecca Sugar played a new demo. I followed Aivi and Surasshu's soundclouds and twitters. The soundtracks are on my phone and they'll always have a place on whatever music player I own for the rest of my life. Like I said, I'm an Adventure Time fan and really liked Rebecca Sugar's contributions towards that show, especially the songs she wrote. I liked the demos that she and her dad posted as much as the final aired mixes. When the first Fionna episode aired, I had just started playing the ukulele after being inspired by my cousins' performance of Iz's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" during my grandfather's memorial service. I loved that Rebecca Sugar posted the chords for her Adventure Time songs on Tumblr and the Fry Song was one of the first ukulele songs I learned. I'm a Software Developer by trade. At that time, I had exlusively done backend work for several years, so I decided to catch up on frontend technology. During a long holiday weekend I made a website that simply listed Adventure Time song chords. My wife did the design and themed it to invoke Finn's hat. It was a great timeboxed weekend project. During the first season of Steven Universe, most of the songs with their chords were posted on various Crewniverse tumblrs. Jeff Liu did a really elaborate one for On the Run. Since I already had the Adventure Time Ukulele website, I ended up taking a hour or two to put together a Steven Universe version. Little did I know what a time investment it would become... The website got hard to maintain really fast. Not the tech side, I threw together the website in a few hours and the code hasn't changed much since then. Part of that is because it isn't really written well in the first place and so it's a hassle to update 7 years later. But most of it is because the code works as is and there isn't much else worth doing. There were a few features added (the scroller that mDan wrote and mouseover chords), some bugs were fixed (mostly with the logic around transposing chords), and the website was moved to a cheap static s3 bucket. Other than that, the website has been stable and even those changes were trivial for me. The difficulty in maintaining this website was all in the chords. I didn't realize how many songs there would be. Adventure Time had less than 20 and all the chords were publically available. There are more than 80 vocal songs in Steven Universe and the Crewniverse stopped posting chords pretty early on, especially as posting chords made less sense. The songs became increasingly complex and not really the kinds of things an absolute beginner would want to strum out while scrolling through Tumblr. And, even now after all I've learned, I consider myself one of those beginners. I took a few years of light piano lessons as a kid and I appreciate music, but I don't know very much about music. I only know a smidgen about musical theory and I don't play any instruments well. Figuring out the rest of the chords was really hard for me, especially since I take the accuracy of this site very seriously. Sometimes I've been lucky (like "Live from Beach City!" being released, videos of live ukulele performances, random Sheet Music appearing in art books, or the rare official blog post with chords), but I've increasingly had no official chords to copy. I've come up with the chords through a combination of chordify.net, referencing other people's attempts, and just hours of randomly strumming chords. I learned a lot over the years, but while I've gotten faster, it still takes a long time. Motivation got tougher as time went on. The songs took a long time to do and I have a lot of other things going on in my life. The show increasingly moved away from simple songs you could play on the ukulele. The hiatuses followed by "bombs" meant that 10 new songs would suddenly appear out of nowhere. The only thing that really pushed me to complete this website was my interactions with people who used this website. By this point, I think other sources, like https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/ or even just entering youtube urls on https://chordify.net/, are probably much easier to use than this site. But on the odd weekend, I'll bring up this site and play a string of songs and sing with my family without needing to worry about finding the right chords. I'm really glad I ran this site and I'm really glad I completed it and I really appreciate the people who used this site. I hold the emails and videos you've sent me in a special place in my heart and I really thank all of you! And even though I'm not going to be doing any future ukulele sites, I'm really excited to see what the Crewniverse and Adventure Time staff move on to next! ------------------ 2019/01/23 ------------------ It's barely been a day since the last update... I guess I couldn't wait since I was in the groove of things. This pretty much catches me up and fills in some of the pre-existing gaps. I'll probably do some more tweaks over the upcoming weeks and hopefully there'll be some demos to add. As for the updates: - Added a song I forgot about, 'We Deserve to Shine' - Added chords for 'We Are the Crystal Gems (Change Your Mind version)' - Added chords for 'Change Your Mind' - Finished up 'Love Like You (Reprise)' - Added chords for 'Empire City' - Tweaks to "Distant Shore", "What's the Use of Feeling (Blue)", "For Just One Day Let's Only Talk (Love)", "Don't Cost Nothing", and "Don't Cost Nothing (Reprise)" as I've played through them more. - Added more videos to 'Love Like You' and slightly updated the chords. Watching 'Love Like You' get slowly pieced together was probably one of my favorite experiences from following a show. Even though the songs are getting more complex and sometimes less written for ukulele, I hope everyone is having fun playing! ------------------ 2019/01/22 ------------------ More or less caught up again, finally! Sorry for falling so behind... so many years behind. I'd like to especially thank everyone for their visits and emails! Without them, this site would have been abandoned. Thank you everyone for your support and I'm glad you're getting some use out of this! Sadly, in all this time there's only been 14 new songs. But quality over quantity, there are some really nice ones. May there be more consistent releases in the future! I'll probably have another update in a few days to finish up the stuff I didn't get to. But for the changes I did make: - mDan sent a Floating Scroller widget that I included, which was incredibly awesome and very convenient! Thanks a ton! - Updated dead links - Fixed a bug that stopped the dropdowns from working. - Added 'Still Not Giving Up' - Added 'What's the Use of Feeling (Blue)' - Added 'Potluck' (No Chords yet) - Added 'The Working Dead' - Added 'Sadie Killer and the Suspects' (No chords yet) - Added 'G-G-G-Ghost' - Added 'That Distant Shore' - Added 'Ruby Rider' - Added 'For Just One Day Let's Only Think About (Love)' - Added 'Familiar' - Added 'Escapism' - Added 'Let Me Ska My Van Into Your Heart' - Added 'We Are the Crystal Gems (Change Your Mind version)' (No chords yet) - Added 'Change Your Mind' (No chords yet) - Added 'Love Like You (Reprise)' ------------------ 2016/8/25 ------------------ Steven Universe has so many songs... I finally caught up. I think I'll need to eventually break the page into multiple pages. I wonder if the average person's computer can even reasonably load the single page anymore. I'm considering starting a twitter to help track music news. - Added links to the SDCC Musical Panel. I was there, it was amazing! - Added a changelog page to keep track of updates. - 'Songs' drop down menu item is now scrollable. There's too many songs. - Updated 'Peace and Love' with the Demo - Updated 'Love Like You' with the Aired version - Added 'Pepe's Burgers Jingle' - Added 'Don't Cost Nothing' - Added 'Empire City' (No Chords) - Added 'Mr. Greg' (No Chords) - Added 'It's Over Isn't It' (Demo) - Added 'It's Over Isn't It' - Added 'Both of You' - Added 'Don't Cost Nothing' (Reprise) - Added 'I Think I Need A Little (Change)' - Added 'Here Comes A Thought' - Added some ads. Please try out http://mochimarks.com!