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Opium Toad night two April 9, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Life, Music , add a comment

Last night we played our second set, this time at the very beginning of the show.  It was nerve wracking mostly because lots more people that we know came last night (parents and friends).  Going on first really didn’t help with that either.  At least we had our real singer.

The sound check/practice went well and I felt excited about performing our own song, in which I had two solos.  After a lot of hanging around (having quite a good laugh with all the people there I might add) it was finally starting.

We were told to set up whilst being introduced, which was a bit weird but we got a nice introduction (and of course we have an awesome name) and we started playing.  Everything seem to be going fine up until my solo.  I played the first note (a big bend - come on, it’s gotta be done), I played it fine but I didn’t like the amp sound, it was generally lackluster and have enough sustain.  Now my guitar doesn’t have much sustain because of the trem but I think a slightly over enthusiastic noise gate was just making things worse.  It also meant every time I didn’t hit a note perfectly it really showed.  I did my best to keep a straight face through a pretty much uncountable number of errors, which was all I could do really.

Those mistakes really shook me and although I finished the rest of the song fine including the harmonized solo it just left me feeling crap.  We then played cavemen rejoice which I think I played flawlessly, I don’t think I made any mistakes but when we went offstage we were all still pissed off with our own mistakes of which we all had a few under our belt in some form or another.  It was basically the opposite feeling of yesterday.

We basically just sat around for the rest of the evening moping with some friends/relatives getting annoyed with us because they said it was fine (and that was the general consensus of everyone we spoke to, the musicians and more attentive people noticed the mistakes but still thought it was good) and we really should take solace in that.

It has essentially just made me even more determined, in fact it’s made us all much more determined to get better because that first night was good and we can do it but it’s a matter of practice and in future, using our own equipment as we all felt the borrowed stuff added extra stress and problems that we just didn’t need.

Personally the best part of this experience was to take me out of my comfort zone, which it pretty much has been for the last 3 days going to a whole new place, meeting loads of new people (friendly people as well, which is great) and generally having a pretty good time even if I did fuck up my solos…

(Most of) Opium Toad’s first gig! April 7, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Music , add a comment

As I mentioned in the earlier post, the majority of Opium Toad played live for the first time today.  We were playing right after the interval, which was great because it gave us a chance to set up, particularly for our lead guitarist who has a multi effects that needed to be plugged in and such.  The real quirk of the night is that because our singer couldn’t make it (his original excuse being to do with his parents I think we may have discovered he was sciving off to spent time with his girlfriend, psshh) we had a stand in.  We had one practice run of one of our songs with him and that was it.  He didn’t properly know the songs or the lyrics.

Given those facts, it went very well.

We waited just outside a little door going into the performance area (only the drums where on a stage but the audience were in raised seats so the lack of a raised stage didn’t really matter) all pretty petrified.  We had earlier received encouraging words from another band who were in our position about a year ago that the audience are generally very forgiving.

So we heading out, as I looked up at the audience I couldn’t really see much of them since the lighting was too bright for any of that.  I quickly picked up my guitar from where I had left it and got it ready as quickly as I could, playing a couple of notes to check that it was all working ok.  And there it was, into the first song.  I messed up by missing the first chord (literally - I strummed but missed the strings) but then got into the swing of it.  The singer was doing it a bit slower than we normally would but we simply adjusted for this and played on.

Soon I was just taken into the mood of it all and just got into it, our singer worked the crowd when he didn’t know the words and the audience were very receptive.  On our last song our drummer stood up and moved round the drum kit continuing to play which added a bit of flare and we finished it fine.  As I walked off the stage I gave the audience a bit of the ol’ metal horns.

To summarize the experience - I may now have something to seriously practice for…

Eep

Posted by Sharny in : Misc, Music, Scraps , add a comment

We’re getting collected to go to our first ever gig, disorganized as it is, in under 50mins. Now that’s one scary prospect…

This is bearing in mind that we only found out about it last Thursday evening, we’re only playing two songs and our singer couldn’t making so we’re essentially borrowing someone else.  If this is anything less than abysmal I’ll probably be happy, given that we’re going back tomorrow to do another two songs…

Guild based mayhem April 4, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, Thoughts, World of Warcraft , add a comment

A couple of days ago I logged into WoW only to notice after about 30mins that I was completely lacking a guild.  More than that, my realm (EU-Ghostlands) was completely lacking my guild.  That evening a discovered from a friend (who was friends with my guild leader when he played WoW) that the guild leader had disbanded the guild and transfered realms.

This left me in something of an interesting position, I had been considering leaving the guild in search of a more progression based one for a while due to little hope in even seeing Kara again as our raiders seemed to be leaving just as we had enough for a trip.  Now I could try and join any guild I wanted to, I have reasonable gear, mostly purples and blues with 3 greens that I haven’t managed to replace yet, nothing special but good enough for a kara guild.  So I quickly made my mind up to apply to a guild that I found that were currently kara on farm and ZA 2/6 with a view to start 25 mans.  Currently my application is being looked at and I’ve been told I will be contacted in game although no communication has arrived yet.

The real problem emerged when I logged on to see if I would be communicated with and saw, to my horror, my guild leader + 2 other high level members sitting in Darnassus with our guild tag under their names.  When they saw me I immediately got a guild invite with the leader whispering to say that after a small breakdown she was trying to get the old members back together.  I was left really not knowing what to say just looking at the guild invite.  I ended up sending back a bit of an uncomfortable message saying I had applied for another guild and that I didn’t know whether they were going to accept me or not, with a confused smiley.  She replied with an “Oh…” (or along those lines) and then logged off so I don’t really know what to think.

Now if I can get into this new guild then that would be great, it would give me a good shot at progression and a chance to do the thing I’ve wanted to do right from the start of playing but there is a decent chance they won’t accept me, they’ve had applications from better people and they don’t need more holy paladins. I’m hoping that my application form filling in skills haven’t failed me (in a previous MMO I was an applications officer in my guild so I should know how to write an app myself) and that I will get on based on a sort of “gear can be gotten easily, personality and skill are harder to find” sort of a basis.

I’m really not the guild hopping sort (aforementioned previous MMO I stuck with the same guild from as soon as I got into the guild scene to when I retired and am still a retired member when I last checked) so I can’t really be sure if I’d ever be up to actually doing the deed and leaving my old guild.  As with before I was with them from level 15 or so right up to 70 and into kara (albeit only for 2 runs).  Because of this I really saw the disappearance of my guild and its leaders as a blessing because it was really a chance for me to get out and experience more of the game, something I promised myself I would do.

It could definitely be argued that the previous MMO really got boring at the end because the game sucked and the guild just weren’t progressing (it was a PvP based system there but we were essentially a mediocre guild for the entire time and probably still to this day) and I don’t want that to happen again in WoW because there is so much more to do at endgame.

Given that I listen to WoW podcasts and read WoW blogs all talking about endgame I don’t really think it’s unfair that I want to experience that for myself even if it means leaving my beloved old mostly-social guild behind. I hope I’m making the right decision.

Fire! April 3, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : School, Scraps , add a comment

As I was coming home this morning (from school, I only have a lesson first period) I saw a fire engine going past, followed by a lot of smoke coming a house next to the train tracks. I don’t really know what had happened but a small crowd of pensioners had gathered to watch the team of firepeople (that’s the politically correct version fo sho) put it out. I couldn’t really tell what was going on but when I went back into school after lunch the fire was out and it looked a little charred but if you hadn’t seen the smoke or fire engine you probably wouldn’t realise.

This kind of event qualifies as high drama round here, fire is very exciting.

In other news I have a parents evening tonight, I don’t think it will be much use really, I think I can predict quite well what all my teachers will say but I won’t be there for very long anyhow.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 April 2, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Blogs, Internets, Scraps, Technology , add a comment

I was kinda worried about the whole upgrade process, it’s not something I’ve done before and I figured something like this had the potential to be quite nasty but it seems to have gone off alright. I guess those crazy wordpress creating cats are still proving themselves to be kings of the blogging software platform (if that’s what you wanna call it).

I’ve got to say, the new dashboard does look rather spiffy (I think I may have slightly stolen that phrase, but it rocks so what the heck) and I’ve also installed a couple of plugins just for kicks. I’m probably not going to go about customizing the page as much as I did in the past, keep things a bit more minimalistic.

I should probably start making some WoW related posts soon since I said that I would and some more random bits of music stuff. I currently don’t have any working headphones so I’m deprived of entertainment whilst walking to and from school, such musical deprivation is teh suck.