Serdang Countdown 2013

31 December 2012

Around the beginning of December last year I received a call from my cousin who was the counsellor of MPSJ to do a band performance for their Serdang Countdown event at Seri Kembangan. After several discussions with our band members, we decided to go perform, but with a slight member change: Rhythm guitarist was Raee (Daniel's friend) and Drummer was Milo (borrowed from Dustin's band).

December was a really scary month for me last year, as half of the month I was occupied with my studies, and after that I went for a trip to Singapore, relatives came over to visit for Comic Fiesta and a 3 days continuous performance to end my year. Looking back it was seriously pretty hectic, I don't even know how the heck I survived. So back to the Countdown performance topic, our band was supposed to perform for a set of 45minutes. My cousin prefers a performance with mix of languages, so we decided to perform 2 english, 2 chinese, and 2 japanese songs for the countdown.

Event poster:

Preparation and Jamming

I couldn't recall how many times we jammed for this performance, maybe at most 3 times, since it's the CrestFall curse lol, we were always pretty rushed for almost everything. The final jamming was the night before the countdown event, which I have to go jamming right after my Christmas busking performance at sunway pyramid (see how messed up my schedule is--i'm copying what David always say haha).

As you can see from the pictures below, I was still wearing my performance outfit, the green mori-styled dress. For the final jamming, my sister decided to come along to listen (if i'm not wrong she joined us for two jamming sessions while we were preparing for the countdown event); and Acap came along to support too~ He went to Sunway to support me and Carlson's christmas busking during the day, and joined our jamming session at night. He even went to the Countdown event that day to support us, thanks soooo much! Carlson joined the jamming session helping us take pictures too~ It was the only session that has so many people joining, the merriest jamming ever.

 

Discussing some stuff..

Resting while discussing on our performance outfit

Group shot without flash

With flash

Performance day - Before performance

My mum and I went to the venue early in the morning to make sure we got the place right (plus testing out our new GPS). At that time the place was still really empty, and I thought it was just a really small event, nothing to worry about. But after reaching there, I knew I was kinda wrong. There was a huge crowd there, I couldn't even see the end of the crowd from the stage, haha. Apparently the whole street was closed for the event.

We all reached there rather early, but I somehow still felt really rushed. Probably due to the sound engineers being late, so we were unable to do our sound check on time. And when they did came, all other performers wanted to do sound check as well ==. Seriously can't believe that sound engineers could be late for their jobs; and not just that! Their knowledge with the props is seriously speechless--they plug on the cables wrongly ohmygod. And at first they don't even bother about us, trying to ignore us when we asked for help on the sound check. Many problems with the props for example there were no keyboard amps, the guitar amps did not have distortion, no monitors, many many more..i could use another blog post for that lol.

It was pretty much a huge challenge to perform on such a stage where everything is insufficient (even the cables were extremely short so my band members have to be stucked behind haha). I was kinda panic before performing arranging slots to do more sound checks because Daniel realised the problems on the cables, and also thinking how to drag our performance for at least 40 minutes hahaha.

The Crowd:

 

My parents were in this picture, my cousin too ^^.

View from the stage: you guys don't really get to see this view unless you are a performer lol. And I personally love seeing this from up the stage, sort of my drive to perform ^^

During Performance: 

To me, my time on stage always flies by so fast, this time was a little harder because I was seriously working hard on dragging our performance to fulfill the time slot given. The organisers wanted us to perform longer as they have not much performance left for the night, and they wanted the crowd to stay until 12am for the fireworks display. I asked help from the emcees, to chit chat with us during our performance break, and it kinda works lol.

 It's really hard to find picture that has all of our band members in it. I've been digging hard from my picture album and gotten a few to show ^^.

There's no me in this picture because I was standing further in front. The stage was really (really) huge BUT the cables were short ==. So you see our band lineup all behind hahaha. And Raee was covered by the smoke, can only see his leg.

One more thing about the performance is the smoke and spotlights. It's really cool since it was my first time performing which those effects and it looks kinda amazing haha, feels like a super star. I couldn't see the audience at all since the smokes were everywhere (but i heard comments from the audience and they said they could see us clearly haha), I guess it's good for people who wants to perform but has stage fright. The spotlights were really hot, but I'm kinda used to it because some other stage has it.

More pictures of us in action:

 This was when I was chatting with the emcees (to drag time). We talked many lame stuff, and I feel kinda stupid, but whatever works well works ^^. During the break Joee played To Zanarkand from FFX, and after that the emcee talking session for around 3-4 minutes.

 This was the guy who gave me that red flower lol. And I forgot the next line of lyrics hahahaha. but no one realise I guess so it's fine ^^

Song list:

1. Hirano Aya - God Knows : This was cool coz when we started off the audience faces was epic, all like "HUH?" hahaha. I purposely chose Japanese as the first song to give people a shock.)

2. Taylor Swift - Sparks Fly

3. Sun Yanzi - First Day

Break: To Zanarkand (Joee's Solo)

4. ZONE - Secret Base

5. Rainie Yang - Yu Ai

6. Aerosmith - I don't wanna miss a thing

Members:

 Lead Guitarist - Daniel

 Rhythm Guitarist - Raee

 Bassist - Dustin

 Keyboardist - Joee

 Drummer - Milo

 Members playing~

And lastly, me the Vocalist ^^

It was a really great experience for us, and I really hope we could get more chances to perform in future. Thanks for reading such a long post~ Just wanted to write down whatever I could remember for the event, so that I could look back in the future ^^

Here's the performance videos: