douchebaggery

2 posts in a day! wohoo! I'm on faiiiyaah!!

Nope. Actually the internet connection at my office sucks so my posts were delayed. 

Aaanywaay, 

My guitarist is a super opportunistic person. He'd go basically ANYWHERE to find EOs or some people in charge for an event, introduce our band and then ask them for chances to play at their events. He has loads of contacts and knows crapload of important people. well, in our local music scene. Apparently he has connection at a 5-star hotel where he previously worked at, and we were informed that they were looking for a band to play at their cafe regularly and in short, we were invited for audition last saturday.

Another fiasco? I would say yes. But then lemme tell you the awesome things first.

The stage -- super cool. We were kind of in an elevated stage in front of a verrryyy busy area at dog-eating place where hundreds of people pass by every hour. Very public area. Very good exposure.

The engineer -- super nice guy. He catered every needs we have and he actually gave a damn on how we sounded so he tried his best to figure out the best sound for us since we were gonna play acoustically. He brought lots of stuff from their storage, no holding back. Whatever we asked, he provided. Damn nice. Oh! He was one of the 'judge' too.

Free food -- duh!

Awesome gears -- yeah. All fender amps, LP percussions.

Mind blowing vocalists -- just got to know them on that day. The guy's voice is Tom Welling-ish with a hint of Daughtry, and he's kinda cute :3
The girl's good looking too. She's a GOOD singer. Really. My guitarist said that Her bf's the best bassist in da hood. Damn I didn't talk to him that night. ugh. Bad timing.

But guess what, another slap in the face for lack of preparation and half assery. That would suffice to explain everything. when we were doing our sound check, our bassist turned up but he just stood somewhere because there was another fella playing with the bass. Our bassist waited there and then he told us he wanted to go to the store next door. Couple of minutes later, he texted : "you guys go ahead, I'll join you halfway" so we thought fine. Cuz we were informed that the hotel owner will show up at 9pm anyway. But then douchebag didn't show up till we went home. Later on that night i heard that he went out with his gf. FUUUUUUUU. In the end, me and the guy voc gotta cover for him. So we messed up. The chords and everything. *sigh*

Oh yeah. 1 important lesson : when you're trying to give a 5-star impression, WATCH YOUR ATTITUDE. Seriously I can't stress enough how important this is. My guitarist was acting like a 5-star ass that night while we were supposed to play awesomely and impress everybody so we'd be called to play again. Seriously. I wanted to kick his crotch and land a nice hard jab on his cheeks soooooo badly but then I felt bad for his wife and kid. It wasn't that he played badly, but he was HITTING on one of the hotel worker in front of EVERYBODY. PLUS, when we were loading stuff back to the storage room, he didn't participate! He just smoked around and hit on that girl!! That senior engineer's face turned black because he was loading the stuff with us while damn guitarist wave his ass around trying to act cool.

The hotel owner didn't show up. He was playing tennis with the governor I heard. So the engineer told us that he'd 'give us a call' again which I thought would be highly unlikely.

Oh! one more thing! When we play a bunch of guys came and guitarist bravely asked them if they have any request. The rest of us were looking at him like "WTH?!" and of course, the guy asked us to play any song from this one band we didn't know. When we played some songs, we made mistakes. Wrong lyrics and stuff and those bunch of guys were laughing at us. At one point, one of them called the waiter, pointed at us, and then the waiter went in to tell whatever he heard to the senior engineer, and the next thing we know, we were told to take a break. After the break, the engineer said it's a wrap cuz the hotel owner didn't show up. But his wife and kid did and she was criticizing us. She wondered why we stopped in the middle of the song and stuff. Well what she heard was our sound-check..

So that's how it ended. We scolded our guitarist on our way home which turned out to be  useless anyway.

This is all I have now, and they are the only peeps i can play together with these days.. I don't know what to do anymore..

worst.gig.ever.

worst gig ever. This is not a gig where a lot of shit happenned, but this is the worst gig in terms of preparations and how it turned out. Most of the people think that this event was successful, but in my eyes, seriously. This is effed up.

How big is the gig? MASSIVE. I'm talkin about national-record-making gig.

We were supposed to play lots of songs. That was what they told us. Days approaching the event, we've got additional details that made me wonder "why r u telling us this now?" until the day before the event we received information that we need to play 5 familiar songs, and extra 5-ish songs while the guests are eating. So we came up with 5 familiar songs, and guess what, 2 of my bandmates practiced half-assedly. No. Not even half. Less than a quarter ass!! Dammit. I wanted to kill them that instant. Granted the songs were damn easy. But even though they were easy, we always ended up playing them shittily!! No balance among the instruments (the way we play), messed up chords, and not to mention the "so-boring-i-want-to-kill-myself-for-fun" arrangements. My bandmates will prctice-till-perfect only at those part where they need to do solos or some syncopes.

That was the strawberry on my shortcake, but guess what, apparently the comittee wanted to give us free durian juice to go with it. They expected us to provide our own sound system. Okay. I felt like getting a brand new chainsaw.

Somehow the next day my friend managed to rent the sound system. Now, another problem: The setup.

You see, the sound system provider didn't even have extra jacks. Seriously. They have less than 5 jacks. The speaker is teeny tiny, and the fella didn't know how to operate things. The sound were messed up. Yes they had huge speakers but the engineer didn't have a clue. Oh! They didn't even have D.I boxes!!! Geez.
After hours of setup, the sound turned out less shitty.

We were supposed to play when the parade arrived. So there came this lady, apparently she's one of the comittee, grabbed the mic and started asking us to play some songs with her singing. So we played medley of songs we never even practiced. It went bad. Well I think I was the only one who noticed the awful mash up of chords and the rest didn't bother. Oh well. So we continued playing and during the event there were a lot of people came up to the stage to sing. So yeah. We played songs we didn't practice, didn't play most of the songs we practiced. We managed to play the remaining songs when the guests are eating.

The event ended like nothing happened, people were happy and satisfied. We even got compliments! My goodness. Something THAT horrible managed to get compliments? "You guys did well the other day!!" Seriously?

Wow. In turn I was ashamed because I know we can do better but we didn't! We didn't give our best! And I'm not satisfied. Honestly, I am NOT a perfectionist. You may think I am, but I'm not. If you see my other posts, there were a lot of unfortunate events, the sound got fudged up, etc but I was happy and satisfied with it because we gave our best! We've done our part! Even though we missed out some stuff, we noticed that after the events, learned our lesson and we know what to do next time!
I have left this town for 5 years and 2 months just to come back and see ZERO improvements. I mean, gosh, they have been to LOTS of gigs without me and NOTHING improved!!! I kid you not! Oh. Maybe I shouldn't say 'nothing' because some of them became a better show-off. True story.

Here's some lessons:

First: COMMUNICATION
Things didn't go well because we didn't receive complete informations about how things would be done. And when dealing with people from dog-eating place, one gotta chase their tails like there's no tomorrow. Ask them EVERY teeny tiny details every now and then. Or else, they'll give you a verrryyy last minute updates and info. Or nothing at all.

Second: INITIATIVE
Our youth leader is one of the commitee. I felt so damn guilty that I didn't ask him about things constantly. Well I asked, just not repeatedly that he would remember to give us the details. So you see, even though you're not the one in charge, you gotta find who is, and then make sure they don't miss out anything in the preparation. When people start to talk about you being so demanding, just don't give a damn. It's all for the event's success.

Seriously peeps, if you want an awesome outcome, then you gotta get on your Kardashian ass and work it!! When things turned south, it'll be less painful because you know you have done all you could and sometimes there are certain things that just can't be helped. Well at least that's how it works for me.



Hey OXY! See what I mean when I whatsapped you?