The Last Day in Keele

Saturday 8 October 2011 11:51pm GMT+1

Sigh, tonight is the last night we’ll be staying here, feeling a little torn right now as one part of me wants to continue living here, while the other longs to go home. Yet, I know I will leave this place to go back to where I belong, because it is necessary.

I guess today’s supposed trip to Liverpool turns out to be a trip down to New-Castle Under Lyme for us to get the last of souvenirs we needed to get. Well, for me, it sure is wasn’t a wasted trip because I got to properly explore the town area of New-Castle Under Lyme unlike our first visit in the first week shopping for found objects.

I’m not going to tell you what I got today, you’ll find out when I get back to Singapore.

Well, anyway apart from spending 3 hours in New-Castle Under Lyme , I spent an hour packing my bag. Surprisingly, I was still able to fit everything into my luggage and hand-carriers without the need for space extension. So that’s pretty much an achievement for me, being able to properly bag a luggage full of dirty clothes neatly by myself, guess the luggage is gonna smell real bad after 24 hours.

Btw, a note to all - We will be arriving in Singapore at about 3.05pm on Monday not 9pm, apologies for the miscommunication. It will be flight QR 638, so yea it’s for those who wants to see me..

So after packing 90% of the stuff into the luggage, we went over to James’s and Melissa’s accommodation, Horwood Hall. It’s a nice area of cottages side by side each other.

Quite interestingly, their place was very warm, even without a heater It’s really strange. Over here in the Hawthorns apartments it can feel as if an air-conditioner set to 5 degree Celsius even with the heater on, while over there, you would rather be outside in the cold than in the room. Maybe is because they had a kitchen with stoves and ovens that’s why.

And speaking of their kitchen, today we had a special dinner prepared for us specially our own Sonic Escapade Chef, Chris! Haha….it was awesome. Special thanks to Melissa for her hospitality to allow us to have a gathering in the kitchen, thanks to James for loaning us his cooking equipments and to all of them for buying and preparing dinner for us.

And we had to thank Melissa’s hostel mates for being so accommodating to us (they ended up having cup noodles for dinner because of us), even though we were pretty noisy too with all the sharing about Scottish and Welsh people and other random stuff…

Well, this time round I didn’t take pictures of the food, but did take some of the processes we took in helping prepare dinner, before Master Chef Chris stopped me. Well, nevertheless it was a good dinner and desert spending our last night in Keele with out fellow alumni in DMAT.

Well, after that we went to Sney Arms to say farewell to the people there, they have served us with lots of hospitality throughout this 3 weeks, and provided us a place for us to have good dinner and desert and other activities as well. We are sure going to miss them, but thankfully we have their Facebook! Haha..the power of social utilities.

Well, I guess I should be sleeping soon, we will be leaving here at 9.30am tmr for the airport, so I will have to sleep early, or least try to sleep, I starting to regret having my last cup of tea in Keele just before bedtime. It’s a bad move..well, let’s hope exhaustion will win caffeine this time…

Thursday: Michael's Session, Farewell Dinner

Well, another morning kind of wasted because I woke up late again! I ought to get rid of that as one of the condition of my climatization. Apparently the more used to the environment I am, the more I tend to sleep.

Well, anyway the day mainly started at about 2pm where we had to get down the Lindsay 1 to attend a talk Michael Spicer was speaking on. It was just basically a sharing session on the approaches he uses in his compositions, what approach he used to come up with piece so quickly in demanding conditions. Well, he actually taught us already in class, but I guess we needed to hear it again because we have not really understood it to be able to apply it in our composition. It basically a metacognitive model of how we think - Generating Possiblilties àAnalysingà Comparing and contrast à Evaluation.

I won’t bother explaining it as I would simply confuse everyone, I found myself to be very bad at explaining things, especially sound things which I totally understand and practice it but not be able to put it down in simple understandable vocabulary for one to comprehend.

Well, after the talk we were pretty much dead and tired, because it was simply mind-boggling, must be the chips that I ate for lunch too. But in addition to the explanation on the metacognitive thinking, we had another multimedia performance like the one on Tuesday only that it had a different repertoire. Well, this one was harder to appreciate, partially because we were already half-dead from the lecture. All the pieces played were great and nice, but I found myself too tired to even enjoy listening to them.

Well, it got better in the second half the show after the intermission, because now your body knows it’s pointless getting tired because I’m not going to be sleeping anytime soon, probably also because the mint sweet I bought helped to keep up the sugar level up.

So after the performance/showcase, we had a 40min break at our accommodation before we met to go to ‘Hand and Trumpet’ restaurant for a farewell dinner. Well, because this was going to be part of the University’s budget, our meals were subsidized, so I had a £13 meal for £7. And of course a chocolate ice-cream for dessert. YAY!

Well, yes so our main conversation there were about our alumni, because 2 our alummi – James and Melissa – joined us for dinner. They are now current students in Keele University. Well, what else would you expect in a conversation of them with Michael Spicer, of course it had to be about our seniors.

Interesting to see how we had really skilful musicians in the past, they were like our imbar batch of musicians, especially the second batch of DMAT. It’s really interesting yet sad at the same time to see where they ended up to and even for some who dropped out of the course – their rationale behind them.

Some of the graduates and are studying in Berklee, some like Melissa and James went to Keele, some went to local universities like MUS, SIM and NTU to do other things slightly non-related to DMAT, like Finance and Banking, some went on the NIE to do teaching. Some went on working in Soundfarm, our local production house of which some of my current seniors interned in.

Those who dropped out, pretty much left because they wanted to do what they really want, like playing in Gigs and sessions in Pubs, being a DJ turning turn-tables, they didn’t do too well in the course simply because they were too busy on external stuff that they couldn’t concentrate on their studies. I guess the total opposite of me, being busy in school during schooling periods and busy too in the holidays.

Well, some made silly decisions, some made radical ones, but ultimately whether they were really good decision was a real question for me. It seems like the older you get the bigger the price you have to pay for every bad decision you made.

If you chose not to do your homework when you were young, at most you will face a punishment of writing lines, which may last at most 2 days.

If you chose the wrong combination in JC, you suffer for 2 years.

If you chose the wrong course in Polytechnic/University, you would probably suffer for 3-4 years and then be free of your consequence.

If you chose the wrong scholarship for a wrong bond, you would probably suffer 6 years or so working in a company you don’t wish to work.

If you chose a wrong job, the consequence could be 10 – 60 years.

If you chose the wrong wife, consequence could be a lifetime, otherwise a divorce, which is also a lifetime consequence.

And lastly, if you ultimately chose the wrong way to live your life that would be an eternal consequence you have to face.

I guess the important thing is to make every effort to make good decision, and learn from the bad ones you make. Ultimately I guess, everything’s pretty much clear to me, I know which route I should take, and the price I have to pay for each route, the question is, am I willing to make that decision?

Wednesday: Free and Easy, First Tin Whistle Session with Michael

Wednesday was another free and easy day, so most of the time was spent on uploading the videos for the rehearsals on Monday and trying to upload the performance on Tuesday though I know it would be pretty much impossible to do in a day. Now that youtube has this function that enables you to pause and resume uploading when you leave and return to a wifi area. That means that if you have like a maximum of 20GB of videos, you can upload half of that in one day, turn off your computer and resume uploading the rest of it as one entire video, pretty cool.

Well, yes so most of the days was mainly spent on that and mixing and eating, not forgetting I had wasted one entire morning still snoozing comfortably in bed. Seriously, nothing beats the warmth that the heated room brings after a long hard day in the cold.

And yes it is drastically colder now that the weather’s back to 13 degree celcius, I guess the Singapore weather came and now wants to bring us back to Singapore.

Well, that evening we spent quite some time over dinner hearing about Michael’s life story, about how he first started to learn about synthesizer programming at the age of 17 where he heard a distinct timbre which he liked and found out that it was the mini moog.

Then how he went to university after that to get a degree in composition and as playing as a session musician in a pub and later in his first original band called FX and then later as a third-class rock-star in Redgum as a keyboardist and flautist at the age of 23. Well, I forgot how long h toured with them but what I do know is that he was partially the cause of Redgum’s hiatus till now. Apparently the band was going to reform after 1-2 years, after his visit to Singapore. But that ‘1-2 years’ turned out to be like I think 8 years till now, and it has still not reformed. That’s bad news for Redgum fans..

Well, but it was thanks to his Redgum days that he was well-aquainted to Irish tunes. That pretty much led to a session of Tin whistle tunes in Valarie’s room, where we basically followed the John Walsh Session Tunes score and played all the Irish folk tunes together. Well, being a poor sight reader and a amateur tin whistle player, I was of course not able to catch up with them, so basically, I had to listen and learn by ear and practice it on my own before playing with them again. It was a fun time learning to play the whistle, I can tell that Valarie probably practiced the whistle harder than me cus she on the way of becoming an Irish musician.

Well, at least I got to know one more Irish folk song on the tin whistle, but I will definitely need more practice on the whistle before I can play a piece fluently on it. Apparently you are not allowed to use tonguing in Irish folk music on tin whistles, you might get executed for that.. You were suppose to play every phrase within on breath smoothly and add ornamentation to two of the same notes played to distinguish the notes, now that’s tough.

But who knows maybe the tin whistle can be incorporated in our church worship band, I have one in Bb key now, maybe with a D major one, it will be much easier to play.

Monday And Tuesday

Well, Monday was basically another free and easy off for us, except for those who have lessons. Lessons as in lectures in Keele, because this is also an immersion program, we too had the opportunity to get to attend the lessons in Keele university and see what their teaching style is like, what their module content and assignment workload is like.

Mine’s on Tuesday and on Thursday so basically I had a free day off on Monday till our Rehearsal at 5pm and following that a multimedia concert featuring acousticmatic pieces from a few of the Keele lecturers and alumni, and of course Michael Spicer himself playing the crystal garden.

Yea..so the rest of the days were spent on uploading more videos and mixing some stuff I found on recording-microphones.co.uk. Just to get back into the practice of mixing and stuff, and of course to analyze some of these arrangements these songs have.

In a sound engineer’s point of view, a good musical arrangement is one that balances out by itself without having to even lay a finger on it. Meaning to say that a good arrangement – a good choice of instruments, where and how they are played in a song – would almost mix itself nicely, so the mix engineer just have to mixed in accordance to his interpretation of the piece.

Michale Spicer has a pretty strong opinion about this – that you will first have to be a musician before you become a sound engineer. Technically I would say sound engineers who deals with songs and stuff are pretty much musicians I guess, playing their instrument called the mixer. We had a pretty long conversation about this over dinner and I guess I will skip that discussion for now.

Anyway, the supposedly ‘full dress’ rehearsal was yet another time of making new combination of instrumental group again. In fact even for the actual performance, almost all our groups were randomly put together, will upload the video once I have the time to, maybe in Singapore.

And you can find some of our rehearsal videos on my Facebook videos as well, which I may put them here should my lecturer request me to do so.

Well, we had our first multimedia screening that evening after practice, and it was certainly a rather interesting experience hearing music that it is hardly music. In fact, some might not even call Sonic Arts music as it Is another form of art though it makes use of musical elements. Most of acousticmatic pieces in general make use of sounds rather than actual notes, scales and rhythms. Yes, they contain pitch, time and texture base organization like music does, only more disorganized. As some would define it, music is organized sound. Then again, how do we define music?

Well, Tuesday was my first and last lecture in Keele, apparently I had to skip class on Thursday to attend a presentation given my Michael Spicer. Well, the amusing thing was whatever that was covered in that lesson was already done so in REMT1 in our first year. So, it was simply like revision for us, in fact I would love to stay in year1 in that module because the whole assignment for the year was it is simply what I just did – a individual production, 31^st July. I have couple more songs up my sleeve to attempt to reproduce.

Well, the actual performance on Tuesday was pretty much very informal and slightly disorganize, mainly because everything was just improvised on the spot, well, that’s apart from some of the band grouping we originally had. But we also had some of our audience come up and improvise with us as well, Well, will get the video here once I have uploaded it on youtube. As you would have already know a 13GB video takes 2 days to upload.

I guess this experience has really changed my perspective about music really, The way we do in Singapore is always the safe way, copying whatever the big 4s have to offer rather than coming out with our unique style of music. We always copied arrangement styles, mixing styles, performance styles in hope that we can make money producing what’s already in the market and not meeting unmet needs, competing with the rest of the more experience musicians in that genre, maybe that’s why the music industry in Singapore never bloomed much, simply because we didn’t have any unique points in our products. Simply because we are afraid to step out of our comfort zone to explore other ways to make music which may be far better than that of what we hear today. Perhaps, pragmatism has killed the artistic industries of Singapore

Catching Up on what I have missed...

Thursday Oct 6 6:12pm

Hey guys, have not been writing much this few days haven’t I? haha…yea..I guess I forgot to update this blog regularly, been trying to post the rehearsal videos up on facebook as archives so that I can clear them from my computer.

As of now, I’m left with 14GB of free space left out of the 180GB Hard-disk, couple of times I had no enough space to import my videos from the camcorder since most of the 4min videos in MOV SD format are like 2GB, so if that was so, I would only have enough space to store 7 more videos, and that excludes the pictures and the audio for our first performance..

Well, anyway now that I will be relatively free from now onwards, since all the major programs are pretty much over, I can start journaling again. Well, because I missed out so much (like 4 days of experience), I’ll just explain what happened during the time of my ‘absence’

Last weekend was basically another free and easy weekend again, this time I’m not travelling anymore as I would be broke by the end of this trip if I had gone to Edinburg with Irfan and the rest…so pretty I thought it would be good to spend some time to update the family about what’s happening here face to face rather than in words.

Since a picture paints a thousand words, a video would portray more words right? Hence the rationale for Skype! Well, actually it was an initiation that I made while chatting with my brother on facebook while uploading our rehearsal videos…well, since I had just re-installed Skype on my computer and we both have web cameras, what better way to use them than Skype-ing one another?

Well, our first Skype session on Saturday 4pm (GMT+8, 11pm) was actually meant to be a test to see if Skype works, but it turned out to be an hour session conversation with the family, well a fruitful one for mom I guess since her birthday was the very next day, I hope that my Skype call would suffice as my punctual birthday present for her.

Speaking of her birthday, she was given an iPhone 4 on Sunday, her birthday. 3 Days before the iPhone 4S was released, oh well I guess people were selling them cheap than as they anticipate the next iPhone to arrive, which actually didn’t have much difference to the previous version. Just maybe a 8 megapixels camera, and some other network thing that we can live without.

Well, our conversations mainly revolved around the basic stuff like am I getting enough food there, do I have enough clothes to wear (which at that week it was particularly warm), whether I have enough money to live as so on. Apart from that, there were conversations about my results and my future plans for studying in Keele. As of now, I don’t mind living in Keele, from what I have experience it’s quite safe over here in Keele village with warnings of drunken people.

But I guess I’m still pretty undecided whether I want to go on to university or simply start work after poly, the course I would take here would probably be Music Technology, which seems to revolve largely around Sonic Arts and less commercialized music, more of Acousticmatic piece rather than pop music.

As a musician I would love to combine the two worlds together, using acousticmatic music ideas in pop songs or the other way around. But ultimately if they can both used to share the gospel to other people, I would really want to learn to do so.

It will certainly cost me my fame and my pride to be a prestigious musician to be a God-follower, because when Christ calls a man, he bids him comes and die – die to all these worldly passions, and for myself, the desire to leave a legacy behind as someone great and famous.

It still a bittersweet thing, to really give up something you love to have yet knowing in time to come that you’ll have something even greater than what currently have or wish to have. Nevertheless, I will continue to be diligent as a Christian, a son, a brother, a student, a Bible Study leader, and a musician/sound engineer.

Trip to Wales

Saturday 1^st October 2011, 2.00pm

I guess climatization for me waking up later, can’t believe I woke up at 10.45am today..must be the hiking trip yesterday to Snowdonia in Wales that exhausted all of my energy, I returned with a aching lead and a broken shoe. But trust me, it was worth it, the fun of hiking difficult terrains as well as the wonderful scenery of the lake was enough to offset the setbacks.

Well, yesterday we went to Wales, probably a 2 hour drive down from Keele. One thing good about Keele is that it is at the central part of UK, so it’s really easy to travel around UK from here, if I had not woke up so late, I would have joined my friends in Edinburg today, now, I missing out on all the fun. Sigh…

The trip I guess was organized to fulfill Valarie’s wish of seeing a Castle and Michael Spicer’s request for his favourite hobby – hiking (Oh no…). If you ever go the Wales, you might want to learn Welch, then you can prably read the signs there without looking at the translations below. So the 2 places we visit were the Beeston Castle and Woodland Park as well as Llwbr Pyg Track.

Beeston Castle

If you love ruined castles, and very windy places, this is the place to go. Well, I probably tell the experience using pictures, because a picture speaks a thousand words.

This is the structure of the castle itself, made out a the castle itself, and it's outer walls and the gateway as well. There were two enclosures, the Inner and Outer Bailey, each having a massive gatehouses with a strong defense plus a high curtain wall with D-shaped towers which allowed effective crossfire along the exterior wall. The Inner Bailey had the extra defense of wall cut ditch running around the curtain wall.

Well, this is what remains of the curtain wall, the D-shaped towers which is half demolished, leaving behind ruins of this mighty curtain wall.

One thing's for sure, getting to a castle is rather difficult since it's located on a hill. The curtain wall is already located high up the hill already, and getting there is already quite tough.

I believe this is the ditch which they build to shooting arrows from. It's a very effective design. You can cover a large area just shooting through this small hole without getting shot, because you are only expose to arrows through a small slit. Amazing design indeed!

Walking up to the castle is another uphill road. I actually tried running towards the castle but I found myself really, really slow...it's kind of demoralizing as well, having used so much energy to run but moving so slowly. I guess this road was deigned to demoralize enemy troops attempting to charge towards the castle, imagine having to travel this route with arrows flying all around you, in the state where any moment you may get shot dead.

So this is what remains of the castle, wait till you see the back part of it...I think one of the vulnerable areas of the castle was at it's back, because it hardly had any defensive walls, people coud catapult rocks from the land below and destroy it's structure easily...

Caution: Sheer Drop. This is what is left of the Moat, imagine water with crocodiles swimming in them, I actually wonder what they feed the crocodiles with...

This is what remains at the back of the castle..pretty much ruins and totally expose to the land behind. you can easily see the farmlands across the horizon. Shows that the enemy who devastated this structure had really good strategy.

Irfan asked: "Where did they store water?" I guess this is the answer. Using Valarie as a reference, you can tell that this is a huge well, and yes it's deep as well. How deep? 3 seconds reverb when you clap, and if you were to drop a stone, it would take I think 12 seconds till it reaches the bottom. I believe it would be deeper than that since many have probably thrown stones down this well. It would probably be full of rocks the next time we return...

And well, interestingly we found a great vocal booth for us to record vocals in here. surprisingly, even though this was made up of stones (of which I would expect slap backs), it is actually quite tight. I wonder if they used to record vocals here...

Llwbr Pyg Track

Well, if you love hiking treacherous roads and love sceneries and stuff, this is the place to go. The Llwbr Pyg Track is said to be the most challenging route among the six hiking roads in Snowdonia. I guess for Michael Spicer it was simply 'no kicks'. One thing about this place is that you have to carry your litter around the park, they have no dust bins one the way because they fear that litter may destroy the environment.

The roads here is pretty steep, almost all the routes we walked in our direction was uphill. So many of uswho weren't used to hiking had to stop for a rest. It's really tiring when you first start but once you gain momentum, it gets easier.

It is best you get proper hiking shoes for this expedition. The route here is not like the normal walk in the park with furnished stones pieces or pavements but it's more like pieces of rock, of which some of them are insecure and can break off easily due to erosion and weathering. It can get slippery at times - I slipped a couple of times in this route because I wasn't wearing proper shoes.

It is good you carry as little thing as possible on this route, and empty your pockets, you will need to stretch your legs out quite a distance to reach out for the other rocks. The steps here are pretty steep at times. I certainly had to empty mine because it proved difficult to climb up rocks such as this.

Although the walk was pretty much a very painful massage, it was still very rewarding because the scenery was just majestic, plus the weather was cool and windy, perfect for someone sweating from the hike.

Walking from the big view of valleys...

To the smaller streams...

Seeing sheeps along the way...

We reached our main destination - The Lake

A beautiful sight indeed! Well, we actually planned to continue to walk the route down to the stream as some of us actually wanted to swim in it...but because it was another long walk, and majority of us were already exhausted. We decided to turn back and walk back..

Walking back felt much faster when we first came as usual, because you are used to the distance you traveled and it's also down hill. Though it was less strenuous, it was actually more tricky because you had to choose the right rock or otherwise you might end up sliding and rolling down. Well, that was also where my sole broke off and caused me to slip. So the moral of the lesson was to get a better shoe next time.

Well, after the hike we had a strange craving for chips, so we went down hill to search for a place to eat..as soon as we smelled chips (because we opened our windows), we pulled over at the nearest carpark. Mike and Cass then went to search and trace where the chips smell came from, while we waited around the carpark area.

So while walking along the grass area, we saw a dandelion, and since valarie has always wanted to blow a full dandelion, she picked it up and tried to blow it...but things didn't turn out the way we expected...the video will explain why..

Well, I guess that's all for now, going back to my room to sleep first...I think fatigue from the hike is taking over me..sigh, hopefully a nap would do the job.