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