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?

MEGATON MIRAI!!!

Hey lo hey ho!
Haven't been doing reviews since aaayyygees haha and I am seriously behind in terms of latest releases -.- so finally thank my gracious God, Mr. Dad and I went to Bali~ wheee~ the hotel I stayed at has lightning speed internet connection so I could download Bull Zeichen88's latest single -- Come On!! Megaton Mirai -- muahahah!!

T'was released a couple months back. Geez.
Ok so first thing is, the songs are as awesome as always, and this time they have incorporated some synths and electropop (i don't really know what is it called) stuff inside!! Also, more techno beats.. Those like kick-hihat-snare-hihat-repeat kind of thing. Come On!! Megaton Mirai sounds familiar during the intro.. Only one image came to mind...

The intro sounds like typical song that would come out from a ParaParaParadise dance machine hahahah but the drum is VERY dominant in this song! Well the basslines are DIFFICULT and it goes really well with the drum lines. LOADS of triplets and syncopes, although the guitar was humble at this song unlike HAUUU. This song is for a minute funny because of the ParaPara feel, but they didn't forget to add some wickedness to it. Just the right amount :)

The other song, Re+load, iLIKE!! The basslines at the verse is juicy ahaha and then seeds of evil burst out towards the end of the song and Eijiro sounded like he is in hell +.+

Last one, Garden, was in English. Not heavy, normal kind of progression. Very normal. Perfect to lower down the adrenaline level from the other 2 songs.. There's a little bit of heavy stuff at the background, but that was it, nothing prominent. The only surprise is, this is their only song that has Piano on it!!

So in conclusion, this single is still sounds like Bull Zeichen 88 that I know, sweetened by a pinch of electro loop thingy. One thing though, their songs aren't getting any easier to play T.T

okelah. Must be grateful!!

Pls don't mind the unaligned paragraphs kay. Still getting the hang of this bloggerdroid thing

Last week me and Bruy--bassist here at dog-eating place met a couple of guys who run 4-wheeled bike rental place. They wanted to build a blues community but due to less demand, they decided to have an acoustic jamming session every satnite at that place instead. We were introduced to him by our drummer. So Bruy and I played just now :)

Just a normal "whatever u wanna play" kind of session, very flexible, and light. Sometimes we play, sometimes they play. Pretty fun even with humble sound system. Lots of people passed by, and stopped by for the ride, and while they are queueing they may enjoy the music.

The guys are just desperate to play, and according to them, this session was created for people with the same desire. So this is the platform, and hopefully it'll grow bigger, with better equipments and more people to come and play.

Humble beginning which marked a whole new chapter of my gig life.

Ahhh. Thank God~

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now here comes the big ending

no. no. I'm not closing this blog.

I got a gig with the escapes back in October 1st and this was the last gig for me here in chicken rice town. Yeah cuz i have graduated and now i'm back at dog eating place. Not-so Happy 1month-since-my-last-gig Anniversary!

 

The gig was a mixture of art (Photohraphy and paintings), film, and music festival. Lots of artist from other countries. There were lots of foreigners there that i felt like i was in another country. Outnumbered. Like we came all the way from asia to perform hahahhah

This was by far the coolest gig i have ever played at. Well the crowd weren't really hyped up cuz it was sunset when we played and moreover the booze weren't out yet hahhah. But as the night went on, damn. There was this electro band which was really cool. They are called 'Like Silver'. I am not really a fan of those kind of music but these fellas got me as well as everybody else.

That shirtless dude on top were singing like 'aaaaaaaaaarrrgghhh gyaaaaaaarrrgghh' and went 'grroooooooooohhhhh' on the chorus when they played earlier on. Pretty wicked. But later on, he joined the crowd 'shakin-that-thang' along with the thumping beats from the electro fellas. The organizer did a splendid job. Hat's off. The performers were varied from alternative, rock, grindcore, erotic-grotesque, c-pop, laptronica, club music, etc. Not to mention free Nasi Lemak for the performers!Oh! One of the artist made us a logo as well :D 

Oh btw, we were the first to perform, and we asked Reno to sub for bass for KeeMO. There was a minor accident when we played 'I do'. The screw for the strap in Jlt's guitar got loose so the guitar fell off him when we enter the instrumental part!!! So he played it like a cello haahah! Thank God there was a score stand down the stage right in front of him that he could place his feet there and support the guitar. Damn. But then Reno had to sit down and play afterwards.  The sound crew were damn efficient. Verry helpful as well. This time i got to learn that i should trust the sound engineers. During the event i couldn't hear myself clearly even from the monitors.. At first the PA guy asked me to max my volume so i just trusted him and i didn't tweak a thing on the keyboard like i normally do. The sound turned out well when i watched the video. Obviously i don' t have extra travelling ears to hear from off the stage so there's nothing much i can do other than to trust them. When we got to play KeeMO as our last song, damn. It became emotional to me as i sang the last 1/2 Eight. Like i'm singing it to myself as i go back to the dog-eating place and move on with my life. Let's not discuss the specific "whys", kay? Oh! It also felt like i am singing that part to the fellas, i was wishing that they would continue making music and perform no matter what because they were all so good and passionate at what they do.  

Alrightiamgettingsadthishastostop.

Have a nice evening, and pizzout.

here's a piece of my mind

========  glass shattered ========

past midnight random chat

I want to buy a new handphone. AP set (approval product) instead of the original authorized one. So I asked a friend whom I think might know the drill better. Until the conversation went south xD

 

Good night :)