Tryout - Fusion band

During my 2nd time going to the studio to practice my drums, I found the practicing to have some diminishing returns. Well, I was to find that the “You Can’t Hurry Love” / “Lust For Life” drum pattern was really easy and didn’t really involve the pedals. I found myself being able to do one or two fancy tricks, but still struggling to maintain a steady beat for more than 1 minute at a time. (Well if you have to drum for an 8 minute song then you’re screwed. No “Stairway To Heaven” for you.)

After it was over, the guy behind the counter came and told me that time’s up. Then to my surprise, he gave me an impromptu lesson. Turns out that he’s quite a nifty drummer himself. He taught me a few things:

1. First and last thing about drumming – learn to maintain a steady beat. Nothing much else matters. This is true. Moe Tucker is famous for not doing anything interesting with the drums other than holding a steady beat.
2. Practice with your pedals. You can do this anywhere. His mother used to ask him why he was tapping his feet under the dinner table.
3. Practice your trills with the snare drum. Once you got those basics right, then you can do all your fancy tricks with the other drums.
4. The centre of a cymbal sounds a bit like a cowbell when hit
5. This is not tennis where you have to keep a stiff wrist. Most of the flexibility from drum movements revolves around the wrist. (No wonder Max Weinberg kenna RSI when he was drumming for Bruce Springsteen.)

The other thing is, how do drummers practice in Singapore? The hardest thing when living in a country with no garages is to find a place for drummers to practice. Fortunately he said, just use your pillow. That’s great. So I have an inexpensive way of practicing the drums without blowing $13 per hour.

That week I went on www.soft.com.sg, which is one of the biggest musician’s forums in Singapore. I advertised myself as a keyboard player who has a grade 8 (this is true) who has perfect pitch (true) and who’s a nifty songwriter (also true). I also said that I have 20 years’ experience but that’s misleading – I learnt piano while young, did not very much, and just let 20 years elapse. I have been writing songs on and off for 20 years so I suppose you could count that.

I also looked up advertisements of people looking around for a keyboardist. There weren’t many around. I thought I had better learn how to play the drums or the bass, that way I could have a chance at being in a proper band.

The first tryout was with a guy who, I could tell, was rather proud of his guitar playing skills. He was also giving lessons to people, and I found out that he was a Berklee graduate. (I’m talking about the famous music school, not the famous Bay Area university.) I asked him what sort of stuff to expect to play. Then he gave me the name of 2 Chick Corea and 2 Charlie Parker pieces. I gagged. But I still went out and tried anyway, figuring out that if I screwed it all up (and I believed that I was going to screw it up) at least I took a shot at it.

When I entered the studio, at least it was a familiar area. It was the exact same studio where I twice went down to try out the drum kit. Seated at the drum kit was a portly Malay guy who admitted to having eaten 3 ice creams over the course of 1 afternoon. The guitarist who contacted me was an intense looking Malay, and the bassist was a skinny Chinese whose mannerisms reminded me of Honest Face (so I’ll call him Honest Face 2).

They started out with Chick Corea’s “Spain”. I wasn’t familiar with the chords, and I was desperately trying to keep up, splashing and sinking like a cat in water. The guitarist turned to me and said, “play a solo”, and I couldn’t play. In fact, no matter how much I like jazz, I can’t play it. At least not yet. The second piece was not much better. I was reduced to just playing chords and letting them jam on. Later on the guitarist made it easy for me and played stuff I knew, like “Superstition” and “Autumn Leaves”. Then the guitarist turned to me and said, “play me one of your songs”. I played them the song I wrote for teapot (Maybe I’ll blog about teapot soon) 1 week ago. I didn’t like everything they did to the song, but they caught on and jammed to it. I was a little amazed. Well it’s nice when you hear something you wrote played properly.

Then they moved on to the original compositions. Naturally they aren’t as good as mine, or at least they didn’t perform it properly. I can’t play well but I am after all a really good songwriter.

Incidently, the drummer here knows the nice dude behind the counter who gave me that impromptu drum instruction.

Later on, when we met for prata, I got to know the politics of the band better. The core of the band was the guitarist and the bass player. They knew each other for 10 years, and they were also part of an ensemble that both of them left at the same time. The guitarist was the nominal leader of the pair (and therefore this group). And he was the best musician among us, technically. But I had a premonition about his character when he posted a message on the message board, scolding another electric guitar teacher for undercharging and spoiling the market. Why be so nasty about this in public?

The guitarist was in full flow, gleefully documenting his exit from the Previous Ensemble. They had a simmering tensions with the leader of the group, who had given a radio interview earlier that day, in the afternoon. Then the guitarist complained that the rest of the band didn’t get paid their fair share, and that their previous frontman did not have much stage presence. Eventually, on that night, and in the same prata store where we set, the Previous Ensemble broke up.

After that, I remember that the guitarist talked a few things about jazz, probably assuming that I didn’t know that much about it. In a way, I didn’t know the theory but I have listened enough to have a feel for it. OK, I was willing to let him talk. He said some things that were useful (like how important it was to have a mentor, how important it was to keep on exploring and learning new things) and a lot of things that were not.

Like how he used to have a mentor who was the keyboardist of an R+B singer. Or like how he insinuated himself into a band so successfully that they fired the old guitarist and replaced the incumbent with him instead. Or like how a lot of people from Berklee can’t play very well, or like how he passed the audition to get his Berklee scholarship.

Throughout the whole conversation, the other two were comparatively quiet. It was only after the guitarist left that things started getting really interesting. The drummer was a session musician, and hired to play with them. He was a drumming teacher in real life. He started bitching about the guitar player, being too caught up with himself and his ego. The bass player, honest face 2, didn’t mind the guy that much, but he conceded that there were character defects. Then the drummer complained about the original piece that he wrote, said there was a weird time signature. I had to agree with that. I don’t mind listening to difficult pieces if there’s a soul in there, something worth listening to. What I can’t stand up for are technical difficulty for the sake of technical difficulty. In other words, musical masturbation. Well that guy was dangerously close to being a musical masturbator.

Drummer pointed out that this ensemble was dangerously close to being just a vehicle for guitarist’s superior skills. Which would be pretty annoying. I said that players in the band must think about the bigger picture, and they should think about how the whole band works, rather than just accompanying a virtuoso. We agreed on that much.

But then the drummer said something else I wasn’t sure I agreed with. He said that you had to connect with the audience and play what they want. I always believed in being 1 or 2 steps ahead of the audience. But maybe he was a professional musician and he always believed in that. Whereas me, I’m a person with adventurous tastes, and I go for just about anything except for heavy metal. I’m more of a pushing the boundaries kind of thing. I’m more for that “you follow your heart, and the audience follows you”. But in a way we both agreed that maybe the guitarist wasn’t always following his heart.

Apparently I had passed the audition, but I shudder to think what lies in wait for me. Maybe I did OK, and would do fine just being very unspectacular while he did all the soloing. In the event, Guitar player did ask for my contact thereafter.

All of a sudden, though, 2 more people whose ads I replied to showed up in my email inbox. One of them is a post-rock (think Tortoise, Mogwai) band and another one is a Britpop band. Both look interesting propositions, so I guess there are more tryouts ahead. I think I should remember one thing: I don't know where I came across this saying before, responding to band ads is not like ordering pizza, it's not like you send a private message on a forum, and suddenly a band appears before you for you to audition for. I suppose the band members all have to look at the responses and decide who to talk to.

I suppose I am making a bit of headway now.

You see, I have options. I can either hang around matchmaking web sites, and write to women one by one begging to have dates with them so that I can pay the bills at expensive restaurants, or I can become a rock star and have them line up in front of me for the opportunity to suck my dick. I'd very much prefer the latter.