Yes, that is where I am now…..right smack (left, up, down smack also) in this very very hectic and crazy week. Our choir just finished performing for our organization annual dinner (yesterday night), and I fortunately had the good sense to remember to take a half day leave this morning. I don’t think I could ever have woken up at 6.30am this morning to go to work. Sadly for some of my choir members, they do not have this good fortune where they are able to take leave as freely as me. So I must say, where I’m working at……it does have its good points.

We spent 3 really blazing HOT afternoons rehearsing for this event, and it really didn’t help that it was an outdoor performance. For any choirs (ok, maybe only mine lah), the worst nightmares that can happen to us are

1) Outdoor performance
2) Lousy mikes
3) No screen monitors (which are for hearing our own voices)
4) The technician forgot to turn on the screen monitors / mikes (trust me, it HAS happened more than once for us liao)
5) Lousy weather (for outdoor events)

It is really hard to project our voices in outdoor performances, cos the sounds that we produced are mostly lost in the huge open space, and we would have to depend a lot on the mikes to do the job. But from the time I started performing in a choir, I have NEVER come across any good microphones at all. NEVER! We always end up with mikes that only catch some voices and so you would hear certain member’s voices sticking out of the choir. Very unprofessional! And audiences would never know that that’s because the mikes not good! In most of the cases, the choir would have to shoulder all the blame one. Xian right?

And then, this annual event har, always happen the same bad things one. During the rehearsals, the techs would adjust the mikes sui sui according to the choir’s positioning and all would sound relatively ok during the rehearsals. But somehow, it always rains before our performance (where the techs would have to keep the mikes), and when the rain stops, the techs would have forgotten the sui sui positions the mikes should be placed. So what happens? When we take up our positions before the audience, all the mikes are not where they should be, and so you can imagine the type of sounds we produced lah! Its so QI GEK!!!!

Which is why, it is every choir’s dream, to perform in an indoor location, where we do not have any need for those detestable mikes (and techs), and where all matters is our choir’s 当场performance. The actual real stuff!

I still have 2 more performances coming up this week….even on weekends, cannot 放过我们. But at least, they will both be indoor events, and for once, I would get to play a real piano (and not some teeny weeny keyboard) for the choir. Something to look forward to, amidst this crazily busy week.