Ok-lar...

Today is probably the earliest I've ever woken up in Nilai - 5.30 am. Jason's fetching us with his car, so by 7am, we are already off. Gosh, it really felt as if I'm waking up for secondary school again., and the weird thing is that that experience happens to fall on a Sunday. After adjusting here and there, we only managed to start practice at about 8am. This meant that we had less than 2 hrs to prepare.

The first song was easy enough, cos it's a slow song. But the fast songs scheduled for today's service is probably one of the hardest and complicated in terms of technicality in the Christian songbooks. They are Hillsong's "I'm not ashamed" and "Break Free". When I heard about them in the song list, I already knew about the uphill challenge that I'm about to face. These two songs require lots of two-handed 16-beats high-hat style, especially Break Free. Not only that, these two songs don't really fit into the conventional rock song pace bars and is pretty unpredictable and uneven. So, one moment it's one style and the other moment, it's a completely different set and the change has to be done in a smooth transition and not abrupt. Ack, I really need more than 2 hrs to experiment and practice on that if I were to play well. In order for it to sound decent in the rush of time, I changed the two-handed 16-beat into a single-handed one which is similiar to the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop high-hat section coupled with frequent cymbal claps. And man, it's freaking tiring doing one-hand 16 beat! There needs to be lots of mental focus also to prevent myself from derailing. Gosh, I thought that the 1 hr practice before CF on Wednesdays was bad enough, but the pressure in this case was multiplied ten folds. Lol, it seems that God is raising the minimum bar for me quite often ehhh..before I could even catch my breath. =p

Another challenge on playing for the main service is also to constantly watch the worship leader's hand signal. Concentration is important there so that I don't end up drifting away doing something else from the others. Haha, when the bassist starts looking at me out of a sudden, I know that I've screwed up somewhere while playing..lol. I'm the newest guy over there while the rest are pretty much acquainted with each other and have some chemistry on playing together. So, I kinda get a rather weird feeling when all of them started staring at me at the moments when I accidentally drifted away. In a short time, there's also lots of stuff to keep in mind and that could result in information overload. Unfortunately, my mind blanked out for a moment towards the last part of Break Free and I was temporarily off-course for a few seconds. I hope that wasn't too obvious..haha. Btw, it's definitely most useful if one has the skill to put up a blank face when one screws up so that people won't know he/she screwed up halfway..lol.

Of course, there are plenty of positives to be taken out from this first time experience. Hehe, for the slow songs, I'm pretty pleased that I had great control over it and managed to come up with a few variations. I've noticed that I've improved tremendously also on the high-hat clapping. High-hat clapping requires a lot of work on the left leg so, I need to practice it often to prevent it from becoming the lazy leg..haha. Yup, it becomes less monotous and more creative with high hat-clapping. In order to achieve the richest sounds, the drummer needs to ensure that all four limbs had to be autonomous from each other. Gosh, this means that my mind has to be splitted into four..lol.

Anyways, the GFS folks are very encouraging. I really wanna thank those that gave me those encouragements and yea, I hope I could have more opportunity to serve in the future :)