Wah

Hmm.

Today passed without much incidence, simply because I was in school for 9:10 in the morning until about 5:30 in the evening, and I had finished my packaging by 11am.

I had spent the rest of the day talking and chilling out with my classmates. After I had finished my packaging, i managed to have lunch with my lecturer, Garry Tan.

The lunch with Garry was fun, yet insightful since i was looking to him to provide some way to crack the Patrick problem... I need to focus more on what I can do, instead of what i can't do I suppose. Garry said that he wasn't particularly impressed with Patrick's teaching methods because 'good designers do not necessarily make good design teachers', and sometimes i can't blame myself (especially during Patrick's projects) for being confused because Patrick's method of communication was perpetual silence when it comes to feedback.

Argh. Then when I asked Ayob about submission for the packaging and the presentation board, he gave a me his typical vague reply about the submisson date, time and venue: 'Ahh, don't worry about it'. I'm not taking my chances.

Then Alvin and I went over to Bras Basah and I splurged $225.00 on a wah-wah pedal, which anybody may know will cause my guitar to go 'wah-wah'. i bought it because I wanted to recreate Jimmy Page's effects set-up which consists of a distortion pedal, a wah-wah and an echo pedal. All that remains for me is the echo pedal, but I deem that will only be purchased maybe next year.

Alvin wasn't amused when i turned on the overdrive on the amplifier, but soon reminiscised about the Ocean's Eleven soundtrack when I did a Jimmy Page lick with the amp cleaned up. But I think the wah-wah is only effective on certain moods and songs, and really isn't necessary for most songs.

After buying my wah-wah pedal, we went into Artfriend to buy Alvin's very important item: a single styrofoam rod no longer than 24 cm. After buying his styrofoam rod, we went into another guitar shop and there were two secondary school kids trying their best to play like some kind of hybrid between hendrix and rubbish.

There is a fine line between improvisation and crap. that fine line includes knowledge of what you are doing. those two secondary school kids (presumably 14 years old only) knew their licks, but they couldn't even tune the damn guitar properly. It (the guitar) was outfitted with a floyd rose bridge that was designed to enable tuning on the bridge itself, and those buggers were trying to tune the guitar with the tuning keys even though the string clamps were tightened.

What's worse is that those kids sure didn't know the difference between a proper distortion sound and pure noise. I suppose they only knew how to bend the strings and hit the guitar really hard. After pummeling the first guitar, they substituted it for another one, and failed at tuning it. Alvin and I were playing acoustics next to them, and I surprised me when they tried to play with us even though their guitar was so distorted and de-tuned the only reason I knew that they were playing with us was the fact they kept looking at us. And also because Alvin told me so after we left the shop.

Seriously, if you can't play the guitar properly, don't bother even trying an electric guitar and trying to sound like Angus Young but in the end play like God-knows what.

What really gave me the kicks was that at least when Alvin and I played on acoustics, we definitely rocked more than the two kids ever will on the heaviest guitars availible on the planet.

I went back and had some more fun with my wah-wah pedal, but I'm going to hide it for a while because i know it'll be the topic of another grilling by Mother Dearest when she comes back from Beijing tomorrow.


Cheers,

Crawldaddy