Stage(d) Presence

The fact that LMF did not screw up much lyrics even though their raps are notoriously fast and furious shows the amount of effort they put in rehearsing for their gigs. One thing's for sure, they blew the crowd away at St James on Sunday night. Despite having to work the next day, at least 300 moshers turned up at the concert.

2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drum, 4 rappers on the stage caused so much havoc below. I believe in the importance of vocalists. One voice will not be able to garner as much response as one more voice. Therefore I look forward to Malkee trying for vocals and I'll be backing for it. Listen to how the recording will sound.

Next Thurs when we meet up to jam, we should have a casual sit-down chat like how we used to when bro Rick was the drummer. At the shop outside Wee Lee studio. And just hear each other out and cultivate a look-into-each-others' eyes that culminates into a "let's fucking do it" impetus.

Singing lessons for me scheduled to start in Jan 2010.

Yours humbly,
Dee

A Ritual

When i saw "Last post 15th November 2009"

I felt a tinge of sadness. I am the least experienced in the band, the one who is always reluctant to spend the money to jam, and I always felt that we're going no where.

That was before

1. we got a bandname

2. we started to build our identity

3. we try hard to source for venues to play.

4. i had the inspiration to drive this band upwards ( hand motion with five fingers pointing to the air )

Now, I believe you all are serious musicians. We dont pour money into the salty sea by paying beat merchant or shiin 40 bucks a shot, to lower our stress level and heal our emotional health by releasing the negative emotions by singing dont look back in anger.

I believe the band, is like any other sport. My apologies - for being the first to roll the snowball, for i remembered there was once upon a time, when it was much easier to set up jamming sessions. But I fucked it up, by giving excuses, and we have to delay the sessions. And like any other team sports, once one team member fuck it up, others dont see a reason why they cant do the same.

What we have to do is hold on together, sit down, and think of a future. What is the future which we want ? Are we playin it purely for recreation ? In any organisation / team / group, we have a target. We must have. If not we are just having fun. And of course- there's nothing wrong with that either. But we have to synchronise our end goals, then we can sync our paths, and manage our expectations.

I hope that we can get more exposure playing for free at events, fuck things up a little, learn and then when we get better, hopefully we can play at some paid events.. and slowly move up.

All the emails and entries about making ourselves better, will not work if we dont talk about what we wanna achieve in 2010.

That's important, and this band has no soul, until we stare into each others' eyes and say, let's fucking do it.

We all have other komitmens. We're not full time musicians. But we have to sit down, and realistically say - ok, let's do 3 times a month. or twice. And stick to the ritual.

I hope we can stack our own pillows and think about the future of this band.

The bassist who cares,

Not-going-to-be-fat-anymore-alex

15 years of playing

I guess one of the finer examples of people playing together and therefore staying together must be this band, Budak Pantai. They were talent show winners back in the early 90s and have since made the effort to meet once a week to play. They're a good example of how career, family and music can be balanced, topping it off with performances outside of Singapore, to show that it can be done.

I've met them in person and have interviewed them in fact, and have found them to be flamboyant, unlike the bad-ass rockers type, but they still answer questions indirectly in a frustratingly witting way, for the journalist to decipher the meaning behind their comments.

Full story here:
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/entertainmentfeatures/view/1017990/1/.html

Review

Last session at Beat Merchant, some issues that surfaced. Other than 2 members being fashionably late by almost half an hour.

- Learnt that the mid's of the amp can be turned up to give a fuller sound in-studio. That's something I usually kept tuned way down because I didn't know what it was for. Usually the bass would be up a third and treble 3/4 up.

- Felt that a larger room (compared to Fourtones and Shiin) helped the sound to dissipate better and would not deafen me to the point of losing my pitch when performing vocal duties.

- Realised that when everyone's quiet, the lead guitar amp is too loud, but when jamming it may get drowned out by the sounds produced by 3 other instruments and a bellowing vocalist. Solution is to turn/rotate the lead guitar amp to face the other players more to allow the solos and riffs to cut through.

- The issue of a band name should be resolved by 22 Nov 2009. If you're reading this, do come up with words. Notice I didn't ask you to think of names by yourselves. I'm not going to either. Just words in your head. The more random the more fun.

- Exposure from gigging is precious and preferred over studio practice any day. Tell people you play in a band and they ask you, where do you guys perform, or can I see you guys play? They don't usually ask where you jam. Point is, if we can get exposure without hurting our delicate ego, it will be much appreciated I'm sure you'd agree with me on this. Maybe look at playing gigs with less pressure, or try going to pubs with open mike sessions where set up is there we play and watch other musicians like us play. The purpose is not to look stupid or show our mistakes, but to get exposure.

Humbly,
Your frontman, Dee.

Streams of Consciousness by Dream Theater

Listen to 5 minutes into the video, amazing things keyboard can do, always thought those parts were done by a guitar.

Tmr easties take cab down aight!

Mr Big ex-bassist solo

Bass Lesson: Technique, Slap Bass, Left/Right Hand Coordination

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCoHgfCVbYE

Embedding is disabled, so please access the URL.

I like this lesson. Shows how much coordination between left and right hand is really important. Good set of exercises to develop flexibility and strength.

Alex, here are a couple things I will recommend you try:

1. First, whenever you need to learn the bass parts for a song, start by familiarizing the notes. You need not play to a drum track at this point. Just go as slow

as you want, and progressively get to a moderate tempo. The idea for this first part of the practice regime is to let your hands 'memorize' the notes. I

really don't recommend looking at the tabs while you play, because it will develop a bad habit of not trying to remember what to play. Just have the tabs

beside you if you need to recall certain progressions to play. Otherwise, you need to try to let your hands familiarize the playing like its second nature.

It will be good if you are playing this while watching a video, movie, maybe, because it will take attention of your head trying to recall notes, and forces

you to 'remember' with your hands instead.

2. After you have more or less familiarize, start practising with a drum track. This is very important because when we play together as a band, your coordination

with the drummer will set the whole tempo and rhythm, and it is the first building block to the song feeling 'tight'. Also, as guitarists we usually reference mostly

the drummer timing and then your basslines for the general feel of the song. Hence, work closely with Yuchao.

3. Make sure you are developing dexterity in both hands. Try out the exercises to get a feel. Never mind if you cant reach this standard yet. The idea is

just to get into the swing of things, and later on you can hone your speed.

4. After the familiarizing, get into the swing of playing without looking too much at the fretboard. I find looking at freboard throughout the whole song

very distracting to the mind, and it usually takes the feeling from really 'playing' a song. Just try look briefly for reference, and time to time shift your eyes away

from the fretboard. Don't worry. It's all a matter of habits.

5. Watch closely your fretting. Really avoid hitting on the metal pieces of the frets.

6. Make sure you train all your fingers. Keep into the habit of using all of them. First, you may wanna consider buying a Gripmaster, which is a tool

used for training finger muscles.

7. We will go through your technique one of these times, and offer some alternatives and solutions.

Cheers mate.