Category: Jamming Session

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Jamming Session

This Is How We Jam

People often have a preconception on what a home studio should look like.  Spacious, sound proofing, glass partitions, and a mixer that runs from one end of the room to another.  Just like the movies, or the MTV clips.  I am a pragmatic perfectionist.  That is to say, I aspire to attain perfection within my means.  I have a home studio, but a humble one.  Good enough to record our band’s jamming materials.  Good enough to record a demo tape, I reckon.  Above is a photo taken by our band manager Selrol using her brand new film camera that comes with a fisheye lens.  It is amazing what a cute little camera can do.  I said to her: Keep the film rolling and we shall have a montage of jamming photos for our upcoming album.  Last week, I have designed a logo for our band.  My band-mates Jason and Cynthia seem to like the design.  It bears our band name wrapped with a guitar in abstract form.  Jason said to me: What about some candy colours for our logo?  What colours are the candies these days?  I can’t remember when was the last time I ate one.  I am a pragmatist.  What are the benefits in chewing candies?  I like Jason’s idea.
 
Have you heard the b-side song “Do You Believe in Me” performed by the Welsh band Catatonia?  Many ask: What does the music of [your band] No Eye Candy sound like?  It is dark.  But what is dark?  “Do You Believe in Me” is a good example.  During our jamming break last weekend, between our practice session one and two, I said to Jason: I want to write some songs, just like that.  We listened to the song in detail and Jason commented that this is the type of songs to be written by the band, as a whole.  And not I alone, which is the case today.  Fair enough.  We shall have some song writing sessions.  Perhaps after we are done with our practice sessions, perhaps after we are done with our recording sessions.  Our long list of to-do items.  Our multi-year project.
 
In our next gig, there should not be a constraint on our play time.  And since it is an indoor dinning and drinking setting, we have reintroduced the slow song “Feather” into our playlist.  What can I say?  The legacy of our ex-drummer lives on, even after she has [temporarily] moved on.  The song does not have the same level of impact without Wieke’s highly challenging arrangement.  No effort, no risk, hence no glory.  Maybe we shall dedicate this song to her from now on, whenever we perform “Feather” live.  Our band manager loves the song “Jealousy”.  And that too, has been added into our playlist.  The original song lasted close to half an hour during the early No Eye Candy years.  Since then, we have attempted to trim down the song into now a ten minutes long song.  We change the song title to “(A Glimpse of) Jealousy”.  No surprise.
 
We have not jammed “(A Glimpse of) Jealousy” for a long time.  A song that starts with Cynthia’s steady bass line.  Then Jason’s surreal, heart wrenching guitar sound tears the veil of our reality apart, sucking us into the dark void.  Moments later, I join in with my rhythm guitar filling the air with an ambient of that repeated familiarity.  Dramatic as it may sound, last weekend, as we jammed this song, the dark cloud broke open halfway through the song.  And then the heavy rain poured.

Jealousy.  Potent as it’s meant to be.  It is a pretty dark thing, I kid you not.

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Jamming Session

Talents Are Made Of This: Our Drummer Plays the Tiny Drum Machine Like a Video Game

Sound, or rather our music, in wave form ...

After the morning Good Friday Mass, our drummer Wieke and I were talking about the popular video game “Guitar Hero” and the Stand Alone Drums that you can buy and play it like a pro.  For our jamming session right after the Mass that Cynthia, Wieke , and I have attended, our guitarist Jason has brought along a tiny drum machine to experiment at my humble home studio.  If you are curious about how it looks like, here is one.

Both Jason and I were quite skeptical on what this tiny machine can do.  Here is our dilemma: Recording at my home studio allows us to have a much better control over the sound quality but there’s no drum kit; jamming at a rented standard studio comes with drums but the recording is lousy.  Besides, my home studio is a more conducive environment to discuss and experiment on the different song arrangements.  And here is another dilemma.  It seems hard to get a live gig that provides a drum set.  Like an upcoming performance that I’ll share more once the detail is finalized.  Jason and I have talked about the possibility of using a drum machine for years but somehow, neither of us has managed to pull it off.  I don’t have the talent.  He doesn’t have the time.

I wish I could share the video our band manager Selrol has recorded as we witnessed the magic fingers of Wieke dancing over the tiny key pads live.  While the band played our usual set, she fed us with the beats that if I were to close my eyes, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the way she plays a real drum set and this tiny drum machine (note: sound-wise, of course I can).  All of us were speechless. Not in a million years can I the songwriter be able do that.  I would love to have that talent though.  I shall start with “Guitar Hero”.  Maybe talents are made of this.  The kind of effortlessness.  My personal thought is that if we put time into nurturing what our talents are, we may be able to do something great.

So all of a sudden, recording a decent demo album at my home studio can be a reality; performing live with live drum beats without a drum set can also be a reality.  I’m excited, on what we can potentially do in a very near future.  We, or rather I, tend to be over optimistic right after our jamming sessions.  Having said that, I have a good feel on this.

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Jamming Session Music Journal

Parallelism Between the Various Art Forms – And My Band Resumes Our Practice

My beloved Gibson guitar and I, in the comfort of my home, a photo taken by Cynthia

My life as such: our public performance in The Heeren – or rather the practice sessions leading to that one event – must have been draining to our band members.  Three months we were in hiatus.  It was the Christmas, the New Year, the Chinese New Year, and for me, much of my time has been devoted to photography.

As I was leaving the jamming studio Stone Jamz on a warm sunny Sunday afternoon carrying 20 kg worth of band gear, the band next door was playing the exact same bass line as what Cynthia has been playing in one of our songs.  Down to the exact same set of chords.  Either our drummer Wieke or guitarist Jason commented that we shall start to copyright our music.  I laughed heartily.  Maybe it was coincidence, maybe it was not; maybe it was influence, maybe it was not.

Recently, I have been hit with a revelation that I can pick on the things that I have learned while mastering on one art form and apply them to another.  It is efficiency, it is synergy, depending on how you see it.  It does not make the pain of hard work and frustration goes away.  But cross-discipline pollination of concepts and ideas and techniques seem to have by chance or by design invoked an out-of-the-box experience when I am stuck staring at the same art form for too long (see Medici Effect on innovation by cross-discipline interaction).

So what do I mean?

The concepts of subject standing out from the background (photography), every piece of work begins with a title (music and writing), a common theme and consistency across an album (photography and music), interesting variation in details (painting), mood (music), and technical skill (all).  Maybe next time before I take a photo, I shall have a title in mind, enter into a certain mood.  Maybe next time I write a piece of music, I shall consciously think of what my subject is going to be, what should be in the background.  Maybe next time I paint a picture, I shall apply the technical skill of the photography.  Maybe next time I write, I shall add a lot of interesting variations on not only what is in focus, but out of focus like what I would be doing when I paint.

After each photo session, I would have to sit down and go through hundreds if not more than a thousand pictures and see which ones are the keepers and what need to be done at my computer.  After each jamming session, I would have to do the same for the hours of recorded materials.  It is hard work, it can be frustrating.  Instead of looking at the color histogram, I look at the waveform of sound.  Unlike photos that I can make a decision to keep or to reject, what to work on at one glance, tidying up recording music materials take lots of patience in listening to each track from beginning to end, comparing to one track to another of the same song.  Instead of the highlight and shadow protection that I usually observe when I work on my photos, I apply sound compression to my recorded materials.  Same concept of bring out the details of the submerged creating a more balanced outcome.

My life as such: I still want my band to audition for Baybeats Singapore, a music festival.  Maybe for the year 201x, whatever x is going to be.

Related Entry: In Search for Styles – Of Photography, Oil Painting, Music Creation, and Writing

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Announcement Jamming Session

7pm This Saturday at The Heeren – Our Band is Ready for Plan A, Are You?

First of all, thank you for all the inquiries and warm wishes for our band No Eye Candy’s upcoming charity live performance at The Heeren, Singapore.  We shall be on stage at 7pm this Saturday (Nov 29).  Music for Hope is a full day event from 11am to 9pm organized by the non-profit organization B Well Ltd – Compassion for the Needy Sick.  No Eye Candy is honored to be part of this fund raising initiative. 

Here are some of the pictures we have taken during our band practice last weekend.  The lovely lady in pink top is Cynthia, the bassist.  The lovely lady in black top is Wieke, the unplugged guitarist.  The handsome dude is Jason, the lead guitarist.  And the dude in bumblebee top is me.  More about our bios in our mini-band website.

And we have great news to share.  Jason, our almighty lead guitarist, has just received his reservist training program and he should be able to make it on stage with us.  Hooray!  Although we have worked out the music arrangement for plan B+ (us sans Jason), his presence will certainly, most definitely add much sparkle to our performance.  I personally will measure his success by counting the number of lingerie being thrown at his feet on the day itself.

Wieke, our drummer-turned-unplugged-guitarist, should have already booked the air ticket to fly back from Malaysia this Friday.  We really wouldn’t want to go plan B- (us sans Wieke).  Because without Wieke, there will be no structure to our songs and three of us would just go crazy improvising our performance all the way taking up the rest of the slots till closing time.  Note: you wouldn’t want to know what plan C is.

The lyrics of our songs have been submitted to the authority as requested and so far, no news means no censorship means good news.  Our particulars have too been submitted to the authority.  We have been practicing hard for plan A, plan B+, plan B-, and plan C since September.  We are ready for our gig.  See you there.

Related link: Read more on our Music for Hope journey.

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Jamming Session

Our Band Has a New Vocal Coach, Woot! – Live on Nov 29 (Sat) 7pm @ Heeren

Finally, the program for the charity event “Music for Hope” is out.  I was just about to wonder if our band’s slot is still on, or off.  It will be a whole day event at Heeren (Singapore) and our band will perform right in between the last leg of the show (Nov 29, 7pm), right in between a young children band performance, a dance performance, songs by a Korean singer, and songs by another unplugged band.  Let’s see how this will play out.

I love looping in my friends for fun events like this (and I am more than happy to be involved in any of theirs in the future).  So I gave my old friend Jason Seet a call and without hesitation, he is happy to be our band’s unofficial vocal coach, give us some fresh ideas to work on, and much like our private performance previously in Petaling Jaya (Malaysia), it i always good to perform in front of real audience.  It is much easier to get into the songs this way.  So he turned up at our practice session, together with his wife Silvia whom Cynthia and I have met before they got married.

Jason Seet is a model consultant (we worked as a team before together with Cynthia).  Full of enthusiasm and encouragement with crisp clear suggestions for areas of improvement.  I always think that to criticize is much easier than to propose how to be better.  After we were done for the day, Jason reviewed our recordings and pinpointed word by word where the emphasis should lie, how some of the lyrics can be rewritten for better impact.  Hands down, the best vocal advice I have had.

OK, time to put the advice into practice.  See you at the Heeren!

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Jamming Session

Weekend Drive-Up Jamming Session Inside PJ Hilton Hotel Room Ended Up Performing for 2 Long Lost Friends of Mine from My UK Days

I have yet another theory.  Ordinary events don’t get stuck in my mind.  Extraordinary events do.  I love to seek out opportunities to do something crazy, if circumstances permit.  To make my life a bit more memorable.  For instance, that one time after my buddy Sam and I got our miserable laughable bonus, we impulsively headed for our breakfast at The Fullerton and spent what seemed like more than S$40 for a hotel breakfast in our home land.  The power breakfast, as we called it.  No local does that.  Unless you are very rich.  At least we weren’t.  At least I am not (can’t say the same for my friend now that he is a big shot).  And that probably is the most memorable breakfast I had ever had to date.  It is out of proportion.  It is laughably ironic.

When I told my band manager Selrol that I was planning to bring along all the band equipment from Singapore and practice with Wieke in Malaysia over the weekend, her response was, “No shit!”.  Uh-huh.  Everyone thinks that I am nuts.  OK.  I can be nuts some time, because I can.  So I have weighed my gears.  Close to 70kg of equipment that filled up the entire car boot.  And I had to align them carefully so that they all fitted nicely.  So what exactly did I bring to PJ Malaysia with my car (in the order of importance)?

  • Cynthia the bassist and backing vocalist
  • My Les Paul Deluxe electric guitar
  • Cynthia’s Warwick bass guitar
  • Wieke’s Yamaha acoustic guitar
  • A heavy acoustic guitar amplifier
  • My huge guitar amp and effect processor, VOX ToneLab LE
  • A 12-channel mixer
  • 2 microphones and 2 mic stands
  • Handheld recording device, Zoom Handy Recorder H2
  • Cables, lots of cables
  • Clothes and other stuff
  • A laptop to store recorded materials from the handheld device

After that horrifying experience with the Malaysian Custom, I was worried that they would tax my close to S$10k worth of used gears.  But they didn’t inspect my car.  Phew!  At the hotel lobby, I was asked twice: Are you the wedding singer?

I love Facebook.  I really do.  Thanks to Facebook, my two long lost friends Kah Lok and Kenneth turned up at my hotel room (last seen more than a decade ago with zero contact since then … I remember that one bus terminal scene with tears in my eyes).  And we performed for them, inside our PJ Hilton hotel room, with the studio set up.  Like real!  Like how we are going to perform in The Heeren this November.  We played a song, we took a break and chatted.  I love the intimacy between our band and the audience.  I am inspired.  While Jason is aspired for online broadcast, Cynthia is aspired for public performance, I think I have found my own aspiration: private performance.

All five of us surprisingly got along really well.  We’ve had so much fun.  And that is another story to tell.

Mental note: Write to Ovi by Nokia and suggest that they should display the captions and titles within the slide show.

Related Blog Entry: Yet Another Road Trip, Yet Another Small Step Towards Our Goal

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Jamming Session

Gearing Up For Our Band’s First Public Performance – No Eye Candy Live @ Heeren

Last month, after band manager Selrol and I met up with the representatives from a non-profit organization, we were excited to have signed ourselves up for an upcoming performance at The Heeren Shops, Orchard.

I wish life is as simple as that.

First, drums will not provided.  Second, our lead guitarist Jason will be on reservist.  Highly unlikely that he will make it.  OK.  As the self-proclaimed leader of the band, I had to make a decision to go ahead or to give this opportunity a miss.  My initial thought was to let this one go in the name of one-for-all, all-for-one.  Jason thought that it would be a wonderful experience for the band.  Need not to say, our always-ready-for-live-performance bassist Cynthia has been yearning for some real actions for a long time.  Our drummer Wieke proposed to play the acoustic guitar instead and we can perform unplugged.

Unplugged?

And third, Wieke will be posted to Malaysia for a long business appointment.  Gosh!  How challenging our band’s first performance is turning out to be!  Time to up the practice tempo.  Wieke is totally driven and we are meeting 2 to 3 times a week to firm up our music arrangement before she flies off.  Another amazing thing about Wieke is that she can so totally play the producer’s role too rearranging our songs to make them sound fresher and more dramatic.  She suggested Cynthia to play a more active role as the backing vocalist.  And that works wonder.  Cynthia is an amazing singer in her own right.

Today we have spent half an afternoon to practice (imagine, Wieke worked till 4.30am in the morning!) and we are meeting tomorrow to continue.  We are excited to play for “Music for Hope 2008”.  You will hear more about the event later.  Stay tuned!

Our band’s mini-site: NoEyeCandy.com

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Jamming Session

Montage of Our Studio Jamming Session – Aug 1st

OK.  I shall let the pictures do the talking.  Though we named our band as “No Eye Candy”, I am pretty sure the reality is far from what it literally means – with me as the exception of course.  A big thanks to our ‘band manager’ Selrol for taking these great pictures.  Enjoy!

PS. For the new readers of my site, we have Cynthia the bassist, Jason the lead guitarist, and Wieke the drummer.  I am the man in black a.k.a the songwriter, vocalist, and rhythm guitarist.  We love jamming at Stone Jamz.

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Jamming Session

So We Jammed Again: Of Heavy Load and Long hours of Post Production (July 11)

If people can blog about baking cookies a hundred and one times and still read fresh, let me see if I can write something fresh for our jamming journal.

While waiting for our 2nd guest drummer to get back to us, we continue to explore the possibility and to learn from our 1st guest drummer Wieke.  Throughout the week, I have been reviewing the recording of our previous session and finding ways to improve.  My vocals really sucked last week so this time, I committed 20 minutes of vocal exercise in the morning and another set in the evening.  And I stayed away from caffeine the entire day.  That really helped and my vocals sucked less.  In preparation of this session, I have also called up the manager of Stone Jamz and requested for the bass drum pedal to be tuned because it hurt the foot of our guest drummer.  The manager has it replaced with a new one, which is kind of cool.  She gave us a very nice room for us to jam too.  Two thumbs up!

I weighted my gears.  20 kg in total.  That includes my guitar, the effect and amp processor, cables, recording device, my personal mic, the mic stand, and etc.  Mic stand?  That’s right.  I need a sturdy one to be freed from distraction.

Lugging that 20 kg gear through several blocks of building can be quite an exercise on its own.  I said to my guitarist Jason that I need to resume my weightlifting exercise.  I ain’t kidding.  I need a crew; our band needs a crew.  (Hey Selrol, are you there?  We need to hire our nEC crew.)

Since our unofficial band manager Selrol was not feeling well, I took up the responsibility as a designated band photographer.  As you can see, nothing as lively as hers.  Oh well …

OK.  Here is as far as I can go to stay general.  The next bit is more technical and for those who share the same hobby as mine, you may be inspired in some ways.  If you are already a pro, please feel free to share your experience.  I’d love to learn from you.

Technical Stuffs

As you may see, the above setup poses a challenge to our live recording.  And I will tell you why.

Zoom Handy Recorder H2 is a versatile and inexpensive device (below S$300) that in my humble opinion is a must-have for those who wish to record sound.  I was told by the sales assistant that when a container worth of Zoom H2 arrived last December, they were sold out in a matter of days.  Journalists and institutes order these devices by hundreds.  When I bought mine on the day of that silly incident I had at the Malaysia Custom, I was told that 500 units were delivered to an institute in the same morning.

H2 is capable of a front and rear surround sound recording – front stereo track at 90-degree and rear stereo track at 120-degree.  That is a total of 4 mono tracks simultaneous recording inside this tiny device.

The front of the H2 should aim at the vocal speakers and ideally, the drums should be placed at the back.  In this setting, we can’t do that.  Drums are also the only sound that is acoustic in nature.  That is, the volume cannot be controlled.  And since there is a limit as in how loud the vocal speakers can go without inducing the feedback noise, the drums are going to dominate the entire recording.

And that was preciously the outcome.

Previously I relied on the H2 to mix the surround tracks into stereo mode (which took 30 minutes per song by the way) and perform minimal post production work at my computer.  For this studio setup, I can’t do that because our challenge cannot be overcome by 3D panning.  Decreasing the front channel volume in order to make the drums sound softer will have the same effect on the vocals.  Our mission is to bring down the drums’ volume while giving more emphasis on the vocals and strings.

To answer that, I rely on different compression settings for the front and rear channels.  I have covered the technique compression extensively in one of my articles.  It’s time to put it to work and have the post-production work done at the computer.

I use a hard knee compressor for the front channel (click here to see the setting of ‘Drum Destroyer’).  By default, it has a +8dB gain boost, which is great to bring out the details of the vocals.  And it also comes with a 30 times hard compression that is perfect for general drums recording.  For the rear channel, I use my favorite “Vintage Neve 33609” (click here to view setting) and manually apply a +10 dB gain.  Mix the two channels together (with a -6 dB gain reduction) brings forth a much fuller sound.  The overall gain is hotter than any recording I have ever had.

It took me 12 hours to select the right materials and complete the post production work for 12 of our takes (outtakes included).  Different studio rooms may require different settings.  I reckon if we do jam in the same room again, the process will be much faster.

Related Blog Entry: No Eye Candy’s 1st Female Guest Drummer (July 4)

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Jamming Session

No Eye Candy’s 1st Female Guest Drummer (July 4)

Ever since our 2nd drummer has decided to spend more time with his new baby – which our band No Eye Candy fully understand and support – for the last two months, we scrambled to look for guest drummers to jam with us, to explore the possibility.  Guitarist Jason called in his friend for help and so did Bassist Cynthia.  Last evening, Cynthia’s friend Wieke who was born in the same country as her (i.e. Indonesia) joined us.  Time to pay our favorite studio Stone Jamz a visit.

It is hard to look for new members.  We don’t do cover songs or religious music (that is popular amongst the local community) and we work on the songs that I write.  Somehow there is a mutual respect and admiration on our domain specialty formed between the three of us – Cynthia, Jason, and I – since November 2004.  And we do have a certain practice tempo we commit, however infrequent it may be.

Before I go on, below are the captions for the pictures on the left.  Photos taken by Jason’s wife Selrol.  A big thanks to her as these pictures captured the essence of our session well (next time I must take some pictures of her).  Too bad, the battery of the camera went flat fast.  Lesson learnt: always buy original battery!

[1] Our cool bassist, Cynthia.  [2] Our 1st female guest drummer, Wieke, and she referred to her iPod during our break to look for some inspirations I guess.  [3] Our guitar god, Jason.  [4] That’s me.  Nice shirt eh?  My new shopping loot.  [5] OK.  Jason almost remembered the chords of our entire 5-song set.  Almost.  [6] We certainly are still amazed that such a petite lady can create such a deafening drumming sound!  Wieke is creatively amazing.  She has transformed some of our songs beyond our band’s recognition!  [7] Notice a huge white ring that Cynthia wore?  Well, while the boys were at Sim Lim side shopping for amplifiers and cables, she went shopping for accessories.  [8] I did look intense.  How did Selrol manage to capture this?!  I look scary.  I am a beast.

At times I would imagine how a new or guest member sees our band.  A band that is still finding its way, still full of rough edges?  A package of songs that are dark, at times gloomy but nevertheless radiates a sense of genuine emotion from the soul?  Songs and music arrangement with no defined structure and the same song never sounds the same every time we play it?  Perhaps all of the above and more.

I am personally unsure if someone will commit to our band in the near future (though I would certainly welcome that idea with open arms).  But in this transient beauty of being able to collaborate with different artists, different talents and be taken to a different height, it is one helluva journey that I’d love to take, any time.