It’s not over!

Well, actually it is over. My Ocean Butterfly Performance at the Scape Chinese Confessions event. What isn’t over is the endless work and practicing because what’s up next for me is the Impresario semi-finals. It’s happening this Saturday at Choa Chu Kang lot 1 so anybody interested to watch just pop by. The item that RubberBand is gonna put up is pretty exciting in my opinion so I’m quite happy to be doing it. After that, it will be the XQRJ performance at Republic Poly. Hopefully after that there’ll be some time for me to take a break and rest for a while.

putting the hearse into rehearse

Been practicing day after day after day for upcoming performances.

Updated the events page. Check it out, anybody wanna come and watch I’ll post up more details later and links to the websites of the events (should have I think).

Anyways… this whole week I’ll be slogging hard at rehearsals till I die. Hope the rehearsals can be more productive…

Wishlist!

#1 A new guitar

Specifically a Gibson les paul guitar. Preferably Gibson, and not Epiphone although that’s the one featured in the picture above. Preferably a white or black one.

Actually number one is a car. But I can’t think of anybody who would buy me a car. Actually I can’t think of anybody who would buy me a new guitar either. Oh well. Slowly save? Hahaha…

#2 A new jacket! (medium)

#3 A nice pair of jeans (size 29)

#4 A pair of slippers. havaianas preferably. x)

#5 Some new shoes. Onitsuka tigers or Converse. x)

#6 A new bag, Fred Perry! My fred perry bag is in terrible condition already.

#7 o.O? I dunno. a hug?

Hahaha… I shall just stop at 7. I can’t really think of anything else that I really really want right now. I’d like everyone to have a happy christmas. If everyone I know is happy I’m sure I would be happy too.

Time for Miracles

My favorite song off the Adam Lambert album. Power vocals.

It greatly amuses me how all the people are running about and even bump into Adam and he’s just walking about strolling like nothing’s happening and stuff’s blowing up everywhere.

Compensating

For my lack of a holiday by going on a mini-spending spree.

Bought a new guitar bag and new black strings for the acoustic guitar (proudly sponsored by Harry Zheng)

And also three new albums that I spotted at gramaphone near Funan. Special promotion 3 for $49.90

It’s Adam Lambert, Kris Allen and John Mayer (I know this is random considering the other two but I really like John Mayer’s music).

So… good music and a super bright sounding guitar. Oh yah… the strings are black. cool stuff. Feel like buying more colored strings in the future.

What to do?

My band mates from Rubberband have happily abandoned me here in Singapore and left for happier days in Taiwan. Specifically 7 happier days whilst I’m rotting away in Singapore. I’m not joining them on their happy year end holiday because of insufficient funds from my LPLB (lao peh lao bu) foundation and I simply don’t make enough $ to spend it on a holiday like that. I wonder why it is that Singaporeans seem so bored in Singapore and always want to go elsewhere. Are other places really that much better? If so, then why are all those other people coming to Singapore for holidays? Hmmm. I guess it’s just the human desire to want to see new things and adventure. Although probably I don’t even know Singapore that well and there’s lots of adventure to be found in Singapore. Anybody got any suggestions on what can be fun to do in Singapore?

Also, since my band mates are all not here, we can’t do any of the videos that we’ve been planning on. Even more urgently, we have to audition for the Impresario competition the day after they get back from Taiwan. Awesome. How we’re gonna even practice for that I have no inkling of an idea. So back to my problem of being really bored now since it’s my holidays. Although I’m bored, I’m still terribly busy. For instance, tomorrow I have to restring my guitar before going down to some obscure location in the West side of Singapore to sing Christmas carols to a “crowd” of people that will just give us shady glances and try to avoid us. Also, on Saturday I have to use the above-mentioned restrung guitar to PLAY the Christmas carols for similar “crowds” of people in the Western part of Singapore. Hahaha… all in all, lots of stuff to do but not very exciting.

And speaking of Christmas carols, Christmas is coming soon. I have massive massive massively long wish list, and an extremely tiny source of funds to draw upon. Oh well. Anyways, Christmas is for giving. Tis better to give than to receive. Must keep telling myself that. Need my $ for presents. Speaking of which, I gave my girlfriend an early Christmas present because she finally got her Macbook and she urgently wanted a sleeve so I decided to just get it for her now before her Macbook gets scratched and she gets seriously cheesed off about the scratches.

Here’s what it looks like

Can check out the collection at www.fabrixcases.com. They have a shop somewhere at Haji Lane and it’s called “The Loft”. Haji lane is pretty awesome, got lots of cool and unusual stuff you can buy there. Ohhhhh… if only I had the $. =(

On Holiday!

Now that the exams are over, I feel at a loss at what to do everyday. Hahaha… So mostly I’ve been endlessly grinding away at Modern Warfare 2. After about one week I’ve gone up by another 30 levels and unlocked a hell lot of new weapons. HAPPINESS! Anybody out there playing Modern Warfare 2 on the PS3 just add me on the PSN with the IGN name cypherzto. Seriously, need to find more Singaporeans playing this so I won’t forever be in servers full of Americans and my ping becomes like shit. The worst part of playing with the Americans is listening to them on the bluetooth headset. To endlessly hear their whiny voice complaining about how you kill them and them taunting each other regarding “camping” and shit is so irritating. Gotten into the habit of muting everyone. Hahaha… on the other hand it’s really funny to hear Singaporeans on the wireless headset when they suddenly start going “WAH LAU EH”.

So apart from playing games and slacking about, haven’t been really doing anything more. hahaha… should really get about to practicing my guitar and stuff but it seems like I can’t get the energy to get off my ass and do stuff. So… later I’ll be getting off my ass to go and do some dancing. Hopefully it’ll be all cool stuff. x) yeah…

-edit-

Back from dancing! So damn tired. Hahaha… I found that I really lost a lot a lot of flexibility since last time already. Time to start training harder for everything. URGH. My singing has really deteriorated so much since last time. Mostly out of my own neglect because my performances of late have been mostly just playing the guitar and not much singing. And also my dancing is still so noob, I haven’t really attended any real dance class to actually improve technique or such. Oh well. In the end I’m still a jack of all trades and a master of none.

On an unrelated note, today I tried to play the piano backwards. Meaning that I play it from the other side. Doesn’t sound very impressive I know but it does crazy things to my fingers and my mind because I’m looking at the piano from the other side so all the keys are reversed, the black keys are nearer to me and all. Also my left hand now must play the right handed part and vice versa. Got the idea because Yarden suggested to Huanjie that we should try something like that for the piano battle in the upcoming performance so I decided to try to see if it was possible. But I won’t be doing that for the piano battle, cos I’m not even piano battling, I’m guitar battling (tentatively). Dunno how that’s gonna turn out, my guitar technique has gone to shit since last time, and even then it wasn’t that great. xP

I did it for…

Charity.

Mostly. Hahaha… So yesterday was RubberBand’s performance for the President Charity Youth Talent Challenge (or smth with a similarly impressive sounding name). Very very very eventful event (duh, events are eventful. hurhur.) but yah… really eventful. Even the rehearsals we had were eventful not just the performance itself.

So the performance itself was full of surprises. The first was that the keyboard I was supposed to play just wouldn’t turn on. For the longest time we were just standing there whilst the emcee tried to stall for time and the stage crew desperately tried to figure out what was wrong with the damn thing. Finally came to the conclusion that the keyboard was broken because the power wire leading out of it was broken. So instead we just decided to whack onwards with the performance whilst substituting a keyboard with a guitar instead. So that was me… playing what I was supposed to play on piano, on the guitar instead, at a last minute’s notice. HAHAHA. exciting.

Then the collaboration with Ai Jia was also surprising. Mostly because she pulled a big surprise when she suddenly said “停一下“ and tried to work the audience. Miraculously I instinctively responded to her shout and stopped. Lol. It was a big clumsy trying to get back into the song again after that but all in all I think not many people noticed that.

Overall, I think we benefited from this performance in terms of exposure. Definitely more people know about us now. So we’ve started a facebook fan page and a twitter account too. People please start becoming our fans and following us on twitter. I promise once the exams are over there’ll be loads and loads of updates from us.

Our facebook fan page

and our

twitter page

So keep watching out for us. x)

Into another dimension

And just like that one performance is done with. Just finished performing with RubberBand at the Kent Ridge Hall for the Nescafe chill out night event. Must say it wasn’t a super good performance but I guess it’s somewhat passable. Many learning points to be gleamed from this gig.

1. Soundcheck. soundcheck. If not be prepared for your instruments to sound weird
2. Prepare beforehand additional songs in case the organizer last minute just stun you by asking you to play a longer set than you originally prepared for
3. Be prepared that the lighting will affect your playing. Things like reflections or glare from lights can affect your accuracy in playing.
4. Learn to block out background noise. The background chatting noise and eating noise was really quite overwhelming last night.
5. Be more ra-ra! hahaha… sorry, i’ll never be able to do this. Just not me. I must say Nat is quite good at this, and I think his joke was freaking funny although other people just roll-eyes and think it’s lame.

The next gig up will be a super short 5 minute performance at Vivocity on the 21st of Nov. It’s a showcase for the Youth Challenge in support of the President Star Charity. Since we only have 5 minutes we’ll be doing some surprising mix of songs in a medley. more details as the date comes closer.

For now… I am just glad that this gig is over and I can rest a bit. although there are still a lot of things that I need to get done. Japanese Studies paper, Finals to prepare for and the Xmas caroling gig also. Ahhh. Kinda worried about that, the guitar arrangements are way more complex than I expected. =(

Final is so final.

OMG. It has only just recently dawned on me that I’m only 3.5 weeks away from reaching the end of the semester. After which it’s the FINALS. Haaaaaaaa! It’s terrifying but exciting at the same time. Exam exam exam. I’ve got really high expectations for myself and now I’m not so sure if I can meet it. =(