12.30pm was the appointed time to pick up Jason and his girlfriend Selrol. Just a few yards before we reached Jason’s house (1 min drive from our condo), we saw Selrol on her cellphone (apparently she was trying to locate the house). What a great start. Everyone was on time. I know that Jason loves Hawker food so how else better was to begin the celebration with Singapore local delights?
On the way to the Hawker center nearby, I bumped onto my long time friend Benny who also lives in around the area. While I was ordering food, I bumped onto one of my clients from the military industry. Wow, what a small world!
We started the jamming session with just 3 of us as we were not sure if Lester our drummer would appear. We were so happy when Lester turned up at our condo.
All in all, despite the lack of practice and the change in chords, we did pretty well. Within close to 5 hours of jamming session (including the very laborious setting up of equipments – ahem, out of touch – and the cutting of the jamming CD at the end), we have recorded 8 songs of close to 45 minutes of length. That is a pretty good accomplishment. And having Selrol around to give support and help taking band photos was just icing on the cake. Who knows? One day we may need those pictures in Rolling Stones magazine or one of our greatest hits albums.
While helping Lester to move his drum set back to his car, he turned and asked me where do I see this band is heading. It was just me and him and the bees and the trees. I pondered for a while and told him that we shall take it to the next step, select some good songs out from out set and really do something about it.
One reply on “How My Band Celebrated Singapore National Day”
The next step for the band is to perform live ! Come on, we can do it. Aim to perform, step up the practice frequency a little bit, and we’ll be ready. We have done enough jam session and we should really perform live, perhaps to a small group of audience – they can be our invited friends if we’re not too confident. For our first performance, we can even do it with song sheets (ya.. blame the song writer he writes great songs with complicated chords ) It is not that scary to perform. During my performing days, my band (in fact, every band I performed with) made mistake. Wrong chord, soft vocal, broken mike, forgot lyrics, you name it. One time, when I sang a duet with my band, my co-singer forgot his lyrics and we both sang different words. The harmonisation was not bad, but we sang different verse ! Hahaha… To us it was horrifying, but at the end of the performance, we got one of the loudest applause I’ve ever had. We performed in a company event. My take is that audience is quite forgiving, especially if we perform to a group of people we know — the response is even warmer. See, not so scary lah. It may even give us more encouragement to take up more gig (ah… my dream word) and even step further than that. If people like it, great. If they don’t, too bad. We can always go back to our living room