Getting better

Yesterday's practice was fun although I felt a bit weird surrounded by Mara Banting students. The 3 backup singers and the keyboardist are from there. After practice, we makan at one of economical rice stalls in Banting. It's pretty cheap, the usual 3 dishes and 1 drink cost around RM4. While waiting for Tze to drive the Mara students back, Johnny and I went to chill out at Macdonalds and I get to try out the fries with the Mcshakers seasoning..lol.

My second time playing for main service today was much better. In fact, I think I managed to execute out all the stuff I want to do for the fast songs except for some very small minor mistakes which I don't think anybody actually noticed. The intro riff and instrumentals for "the time has come" requires lots of concentration and focus for the beats. The first time I did the song was in CF but I must say I'm improvised a lot on that song since then coz in CF previously, nobody did the long intro. Yup, in GFS, we have Tze and I must say, he's a truly awesome electric guitarist. It was 10 minutes straight of playing for the fast songs because we connected immediately right after the ending to "what the world will never take". Whew..thank God that it sounded decent because this is the first time that I perform dual-handed high-hat and it was also quick speed coupled with connectives, thereby raising the level of difficulty. "what the world" had a short superb guitar solo which I really like...haha.

Lol, drumming for Hillsong's newer fast songs nowadays is not easy at all as compared to their older ones. If you wanna see some really good drumming, check out a few of the druming covers in youtube on "the time has come". Those are drumming of the highest calibre, full of focus and composure under complicated situation plus they make it seem so easy..haha. I kinda have an idea of what they were doing but to translate into my hand movements would need a lot of practice. Mhhhmmm..somehow I felt that I'm more familiar doing drumming with the regular rock songs that I usually listen to rather than the fast songs in Hillsong. I guess that's coz of familiarity and frequency of listening and dissecting the technical aspects of my regular rock songs..haha. I would say that those fast songs in Hillsongs are a cross-breed between jazz and rock? They don't conform to the structure of the usual rock music and I suspect there's some jazz element in there with all the splish splash..haha. I'm still in the process of training my left off-hand, which I'm very pleased that it has improved tremendously since the beginning of this year. Hehe, another thing is that I have a very lazy bad habit while drumming, that is, I don't like to give timing for the rest of the musicians (especially whenever I had to start first by smacking the sticks or the high-hats)..lol.