Sweep Picking Lesson

10,000 Hours: Bill Joy, Bill Gates and The Beatles

This is the story extracted out of the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. And of course I didn’t chose this book because of the author’s name, but the book chose me. Haha. Let’s dive into the meat of it. It’s a book about chance and skills. Let's forget Bill Joy. He's not as famous the other 2 names in the title : Bill gates and The Beatles. It seems that they're not the BEST in its time. It's because of the opportunity which was presented to them, and by chance and luck, they were already armed with a lot of experience and exposure in their respective fields. Read their background and you'll understand why. On hindsight, everything looks as if it's 'meant to be'.. or they were at the right place at the right time.

But the truth is that, I believe we should look ahead. Just like how the Beatles have clocked more than 10,000 hours playing in (maybe) lupsup bars before they reached 20, and how Bill Gates has been tinkering with Mainframes and computer what nots, we have to clock our 10,000 hours before we can say, let's play with some self-esteem.

Before that, we're just not ready. Practice makes perfect. There's no shortcut.

Irritants

Will transfer the recordings tonight after a photoshoot. Firstly would wanna comment on last night's session. Malkee's first time as vocalist! Quite smooth, for a first timer, I think we'd do fine as the vocalists in future. Listen to how I back you up, as there're spaces where you can fill in for me as well.

Bass was having a blast with i will survive while guitarists were not that prepared for it yet :P diu diu diudiu.... Drums were a bit off, like not able to get into the groove last night. Maybe coz cannot hear properly each others' parts due to the feedback that was coming in excessive amounts? Gosh we gotta do something about that. Me can't hear myself play, realise the importance of equalizer to control the muffling of my playing.

Next session hopefully we'll bring our own gear there.

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As i believe the identity of a group makes them come closer, i shall do my part. :) Vote vote. u can choose 2 or 3. which one makes you comfortable.

let me know

Stage(d) Presence

The fact that LMF did not screw up much lyrics even though their raps are notoriously fast and furious shows the amount of effort they put in rehearsing for their gigs. One thing's for sure, they blew the crowd away at St James on Sunday night. Despite having to work the next day, at least 300 moshers turned up at the concert.

2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 drum, 4 rappers on the stage caused so much havoc below. I believe in the importance of vocalists. One voice will not be able to garner as much response as one more voice. Therefore I look forward to Malkee trying for vocals and I'll be backing for it. Listen to how the recording will sound.

Next Thurs when we meet up to jam, we should have a casual sit-down chat like how we used to when bro Rick was the drummer. At the shop outside Wee Lee studio. And just hear each other out and cultivate a look-into-each-others' eyes that culminates into a "let's fucking do it" impetus.

Singing lessons for me scheduled to start in Jan 2010.

Yours humbly,
Dee

A Ritual

When i saw "Last post 15th November 2009"

I felt a tinge of sadness. I am the least experienced in the band, the one who is always reluctant to spend the money to jam, and I always felt that we're going no where.

That was before

1. we got a bandname

2. we started to build our identity

3. we try hard to source for venues to play.

4. i had the inspiration to drive this band upwards ( hand motion with five fingers pointing to the air )

Now, I believe you all are serious musicians. We dont pour money into the salty sea by paying beat merchant or shiin 40 bucks a shot, to lower our stress level and heal our emotional health by releasing the negative emotions by singing dont look back in anger.

I believe the band, is like any other sport. My apologies - for being the first to roll the snowball, for i remembered there was once upon a time, when it was much easier to set up jamming sessions. But I fucked it up, by giving excuses, and we have to delay the sessions. And like any other team sports, once one team member fuck it up, others dont see a reason why they cant do the same.

What we have to do is hold on together, sit down, and think of a future. What is the future which we want ? Are we playin it purely for recreation ? In any organisation / team / group, we have a target. We must have. If not we are just having fun. And of course- there's nothing wrong with that either. But we have to synchronise our end goals, then we can sync our paths, and manage our expectations.

I hope that we can get more exposure playing for free at events, fuck things up a little, learn and then when we get better, hopefully we can play at some paid events.. and slowly move up.

All the emails and entries about making ourselves better, will not work if we dont talk about what we wanna achieve in 2010.

That's important, and this band has no soul, until we stare into each others' eyes and say, let's fucking do it.

We all have other komitmens. We're not full time musicians. But we have to sit down, and realistically say - ok, let's do 3 times a month. or twice. And stick to the ritual.

I hope we can stack our own pillows and think about the future of this band.

The bassist who cares,

Not-going-to-be-fat-anymore-alex