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music apprenticeship thingOctober 26 hallo halloHullo, I decided to look at this blog because my next exam is in slightly less than a week's time... so I have a bit of breathing time at the moment. I think I've played the piano about once in the past month, heh. And I only sing in the shower because I realised that my desk is next to my neighbour's bedroom (wouldn't it be awful to be unable to go to sleep because a girl is shrilling away on the other side of the wall?). (I usually sing at my desk if I don't sing in the shower.) Anyway, it appears that MSN Spaces has improved their interface (in terms of the entry-posting page). A bit too late, for me... What can I say about Joe? He is... - very dedicated to his art and profession - good at combining the two (art and profession) - a perfectionist (i like) - full of EQ (I think this is really important in order to be a good producer) - full of good speeches about the Singapore music scene - so sharp (i mean his mind, not his pitching or anything...) and so supportive. I'm awed that he spent so much time on me; I really am. I hope he lives for a very long time. (In Mandarin they'd probably say the "wan shui wan wan shui" thing... but of course in English that just comes off... like the way it did just now.) Actually I hope he will have cute little kids someday, then I can teach them piano for free if they want. I can also bake cookies for them or something. I want to bake cookies for Alex somewhere within the next two years, because he's a lovely guy too. Anyway, MSN Spaces, I like Wordpress a lot better than I like you. I use Wordpress on my blog, which is at http://mistersun.org. So if you want some kind of continuation to this blog, there you go. August 28 more little thingsone thing i am quite certain of these days: i've got to start writing again. songwriting at least, i mean. this time it's not just for myself; or rather, it feels as if it's not just for myself.
then wait one year for the songs to settle. one year, because i don't play as much piano as i used to - so because i put in less daily piano time, it takes longer to do songs. very simple, in that sense.
must become increasingly careful of what i commit to paper / email / etc.
enjoy the silence, depeche mode!
aiya, i am simple to be simple lah. anyway, there is a ton of stuff to write about. there is a kelvin tong that styles himself a writer. i wanna be a writer too; i've always been a wannabe writer. first i started on prose, then i slid conveniently into bad poetry (the common mindset at that time... at least it seemed to me - was 'yay poetry is easier cos it is shorter and you can write in fragments and babble more'... yes, very bad mindset. at any rate, i read more bad poetry than bad prose from wouldbe writers my age, when i was a happily angsty teeny girl that was full of, um, bjork and tori amos and suzanne vega and sinead o'connor and blahblahblah list of female singer-songwriters), then i degenerated into songwriting because the lame rationale was 'ah... my poetry sucks. ah.... maybe i should try to compensate for the bad words by supporting them with music. ah... the music's not that great in itself. ah.... maybe i can compensate for the substandard music by supporting it with words!' etc.
also, my sister is VERY smart. i want her to be my back-up singer forever and ever because she can cope/adapt to my last-minute-ness and scatteredness, and she can learn one song's harmony in five minutes etc, and get it right the second time we run through the song. she sings harmony much better than i can. i have a tendency to slide in the direction of the melody line everytime i sing harmony. sometimes i dunch like her phrasing/diction though, cos it reminds me of vienna teng's diction and i don't like vienna teng's diction. but sister is good. sister can hold tunes. that is more than i could do at her age.
i should have told that to joe when we were recording the three-syllable harmony bit for the secret space song (that took a lot of takes), but somehow i didn't realise that myself... it only just clicked in my head today.
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and then cindy from noise singapore called me today and asked when i was gonna submit stuff and i said it was still in the progress of being done and we hadn't finished yet etc so she wants it before i go. so ok. August 24 aiya some stuff1. i like late-night recording; i do.
2. the url is really true. REALLY.
"where's the booth?" - joe, when he stepped into the MFG office
"like snow patrol... except with a drum machine" - patrick, describing his apprentice.
"what colour is this? beige... or light grey..." - joe, trying to describe the shaded soundclip thing.
aiya, i dunno lah, i find stuff like that funny. i'm not very good at describing things though.
now i want to have lots of energy like joe too. so i should jog and not eat carbs after 6. & i've gotten over the sight of joe clicking at a computer and recording things and trying to use nuendo!
i should bake cookies or something. August 04 "like a strand in the wind" (04392899)Saturday: Earshot gig. Was bad. (To be more accurate and objective, it had two good points, though.) More on that in a separate post.
Sunday: Cabaret. Good choice of material to stage. Gallant efforts to do the musical justice, but there's the saying "E for Effort!" But now I understand why Hong Xinyi (the Life! reporter that reviewed the musical, I think) wrote her review the way she did. You can't slam a musical like that - not when it's obvious the cast is trying so hard... it's, um, hard to be that heartless. And it is true - the raw book and songs etc are good stuff. It's one of my favourite musicals. Liza Minnelli! She made the role, and the role made her.
Monday: Jammed with Brian and Jon. So bizarre. Jonathan's an incredibly sharp musician (one of the quickest I've encountered; he picks up and reacts to things so fast) but sometimes he likes to go off on tangents, it seems... like his Family Guy song. Aiya still amusing lah. And Brian is so solid.
Tuesday: Mogwai. Really good, and gave me ideas.
Wednesday: Gigged at the SAC with Jonathan. He kinda debuted his first original there, so hurrah for him. Sound levels made me uneasy. Plus, in retrospect, bad choice of (certain) songs. (Not for that kind of crowd, anyway). On the whole, it wasn't a good gig, but the company was great.
Thursday: Radio interview thing in which I gushed about Joe. Hopefully he won't be too surprised if he ever hears the interview. Plus, they played a song that he hasn't even heard (not to mention - it's pretty unrepresentative of the kind of direction Joe and I are heading in for the Noise Apprenticeship songs...), that I kinda did 3 years ago. The DJ was very nice. And it was also fun to talk to Zul (Patrick's apprentice) after that.
I dunno; these days I feel as if I want to write loads and loads of pop-sounding things. Aiya, partly because it's fun to do that, and because it's challenging to write good, tight, pop, and because it's also challenging to write a song that will grab an audience upon first listen.
That, and the gradual realisation I need to record songs before I go back to Baltimore, or I'll REALLY kick myself on that plane when September comes. July 21 i started trying to play the guitarMy sister and I share a bedroom with an attached bathroom. Lately she's been trying to learn the guitar.
I went to shower; she took out a guitar and and a bunch of chord sheets and tried to strum things.
After I came out of the shower, she went to shower; I picked up the guitar and started fiddling around with it (not literally).
We wound up writing a song before we went to sleep.
I don't play guitar.
Anyway, it was the first time I took a personal interest in the instrument. I was very amazed and excited. Amazing how guitarists must be able to have a very good sense of chord inversions and arrangements - based on how the instrument works. Also extremely interesting how the guitar seems more naturally given to dissonances that make chords more interesting - that is, it seems harder to play some "straight" chords than it is to play their more jazzed-up versions (i.e. sus2 sus4 add2 add4 6ths 7ths etc). It's all just the tip of the iceberg, yeah. I suspect guitarists would be terrific at 4-part harmony arrangements. It seems less intuitive when you do 4-part on the piano - -or-, maybe this is because I've been playing the piano too long, and I do a lot of shortcuts/lazy-playing on the piano, maybe. But it does seem that you're much more attuned to the nuances of chord progressions (i.e. the motion of the individual notes when you change chords etc) when you play chords on guitar.
Then again, technically (according to my old piano teacher) you're supposed to be very aware of this sort of thing when you play 4-part on the piano. So I suppose it really was just a case of me taking liberties and having bad/sloppy fingering and trying to find easy ways out.
Also, I sound quite different on the guitar, I think. In terms of songwriting/style - the angst factor is trimmed down by quite a bit.
More reason to suspect that my piano-playing's stuck in a style that I've mentally outgrown but can't seem to practically escape.
Dunno.
My sister seems to work well with me in terms of co-writes. We both think the same way about language/lyrics, and she knows what I intend/mean about internal rhymes, structure, wordplay, alliteration, assonance... etc - without me having to say it to her all the time etc. She's younger and cares more about the world (in a way) in greater detail (in some sense) - so she's more precise about some aspects of language and phrasing than I am (which is good... I'm a lot sloppier than I used to be about 5 years ago). It's a very...valuable age/phase.
Now I'm wondering whether I can finger the telephone at work, to practise. Guitar, I mean.
No one calls me, anyway.
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