what the hell?

I am going to dedicate more time to playing bass Spring Quarter. I Promise.

Last Thursday, May 13th
To start off let me just say that although I messed up I don't think I was messing up that badly. Anyways we ended up coming in dead last.

Now I'm pretty bummed by this mainly because of a couple of things. First off they only had two microphones, one of which was barely on. Second, they had one extension cord that didn't go very far so all our amps were on the far left side. Three, because said amps were so far away I could barely reach the microphone when I did the Oooohs for Undone because of fear of breaking the pick guard for my bass. And lastly the person who won was part of the student CV staff which seemed a little suspicious. She did a dance that went along to "The Reason" by Hoobastank. While it wasn't "bad" it wasn't better than the belly dancer that was on earlier. I don't know why bands always get snubbed during these talent shows. I mean dancing is pretty hard but practicing and playing instruments isn't exactly the easiest or cheapest thing in the world to do. Hell we should have just played "The Reason" and drawn a really strong audience crowd but that song is very easy to play on bass and I would imagine that its pretty easy on guitar since the whole song is three chords (while typing that I put down 'thords' instead so I think I'll call songs that are only three chords). But to be fair we did play Undone, which is a thord song. But Undone actually requires effort by the whole band and you can actually throw in some variation in that song.

Speaking of which, after we got over our placement in the show I was just glad we totally nailed Undone. Freshmen year we played in the Middle Earth talent show and just stunk it up. Josh was just learning to play with a pick and apparently his B-string wanted to go flat that night. I was just barely learning bass and my D-String went flat as well. Just so many problems that occured during that performance. So we decided to play Undone again so we can say that we could nail that song. And I think we redeemed ourselves from that terrible first year performance. I was able to actually put in some of the walking bass lines that I see Matt Sharp (former Weezer bassist) do on some of the old Weezer videos. If nothing else, it was just great being able to totally rock out that song like we should have done freshmen year.

Setlist:
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Soul to Squeeze
Weezer: Undone

I need a bass so bad.

I went yesterday with Erik and Yoong to Guitar Center before we went to watch Club Dread to just check out stuff. I played around with three basses. A Spector (around $375), an Ibanez ($600+ . oh wait I don't have that smiley yet.) and a really weird Fender Jazz Bass.

After playing with those three the Ibanez was the best one. Nice slap sound and easy to fret strings. The Fender had no frets (athough it had markers for it) plus it had flat strings which I guess just feel different, not necessarily bad.

But yeah so now I really need a bass.

On Thursday CA went Karaoking at the Elvis Karaoke and then went to go get some Pho.

Now I'm at home.

My parents have had this house ever since we moved here to California. But that was way way back there. Ever since we first moved in we have had only one couch. This couch could seat about 5 people and was this kind of 70's tan color with black floral designs.

To my surprise, when I came home Friday night the couch had been replaced with this L-shaped leather couch. I'm still having difficult adjusting to this thing. It's comfy and all but it's just so much bigger than the old couch.

My uncle is also visiting from Taiwan. He was detained a couple of hours at customs because they were suspicious of him only staying a couple of days everytime he visited.

And then today I went to buy a used bass amp somewhere in Downey.

Last night while I was testing out the new smilies I accidently clicked on the link to edit my Kill Bill "review" instead of clicking on the link to edit the comment I had left. So lo and behold when I go to click the delete link, it deleted the post instead of the comment.

I had forgotten what I was going to write and just looked at the screen for a couple of minutes. Then I realized what I wanted to talk about. The bass getting no respect

When Erik and I went to watch School of Rock, they show all the kids jamming in the closing credits. All of them get a solo... EXCEPT FOR THE GIRL BASSIST! I mean c'mon I know keyboard and backup vocals are pretty important but why can't the girl just get a solo like the rest of the band? Everyone got a solo, except for the bassist! Even Moby agrees with me (is that good or bad?).

so i went and saw the 'rock school' or 'school of rock' or whatever it's called movie this evening and it was very sweet. kind of like 'dead poets society' for the lollapalooza generation. my only criticism is that the female bass player didn't get a solo as the credits were rolling.
everyone else got a solo. why didn't the female bass player get a solo?
i don't know why this bugged me so much, but it did. a lovely movie, compromised by the fact that the female bass player was the only member of an 8 piece band who didn't get a closing credits solo.
she should've been given her own solo. poor little bass player.

Where is the love (for the bass)? The other day I had to do a project with my group for Chinese class. And I mention that I played the bass. One guy goes, "Isn't that easy to play?" while one of the girls in the group goes, "No man, bass is cool, bass keeps the rhythm."

Look, I understand that the bass only has to worry about one note at a time as oppose to guitar players who have to (for the most part) worry about three notes to form a chord. But lots of guitarists in bands play just power chords which might as well be playing one night. Hell I can play a goddamn power chord on my bass!

But to be fair, it's probably pretty easy to pick up a bass and learn simple stuff to get by. But I mean lots of instruments only play one note at a time (like uh nearly all of them) yet they don't get the bad rap that a bass gets. I use to play trumpet and trombone and those instruments only produces one note at a time, so why doesn't anyone say a trumpet or trombone is easy to play? I guess learning the basics would be easy but mastering any instrument is pretty hard ('sup triangle players).

Erik came by yesterday to help tune Andrew's guitar. Then he helped me out with some songs although the tab we got for Hands Down was weird, to say the least.

While he was here I realized that the VMAs were on. Only by Satellite is on EST for some reason so by the time we turned it on we had missed the first 2 hours. So we watched the final hour of it. I thought I had missed the Coldplay performance but it turns out that we were just in time to see it. And man were they spectacular. Seriously I want to make love to this band and have its babies.

Some thoughts about the show: I missed the Britney/Madonna kiss but thanks to the Internet I can relive those 5 seconds of hot hot kissing. Also 50 cent seems to have been nominated for every single award in the show. Every single time they go through the nominees for a category you hear, "In The Club." I think they would still have that song even if the category was Best Female Group or Best Rock Performance. When they started playing Beyonce Knowle's "Crazy in Love" during one of their commercial breaks Erik got up and said, "That reminds me, I got to figure out how to play that on guitar" and promptly went into the other room. Metallica seems to get worse with every showing.

Today I went to Guitar Center. I bought a tuner, picks and a book. I didn't know Fender picks were so goddamn expensive. I didn't know tuners were so expensive. Everything is expensive. I was playing around with a 100 watt amp with this nice looking bass. This is what I desire the most right now. A new bass and amp. Maybe it's just my amp or maybe it's my bass but I'm not happy with the way it sounds although technically there's nothing wrong with the sound, there's nothing really right about it either. It sounds nothing like what I think a bass should sound like.

Another thing I noticed, I never seem to fini

I wanted to post, but I had nothing so here are some random thoughts.

Santeria on bass is fun to play

They showed the video that my group for Mandarin did on Sunday in class today. I thought ours was done very well and so were the other ones. We did one about a city guy spending a day with his two rural cousins (read: hicks). The other two groups did one based of Charlies Angels and another one that did a New Channel, which they called FOBTV (also the logo was the NBC peacock feathers with a hand doing the peace sign).

That thing that tells you about yourself based on your name is weird. On the one hand, for the most part they give vague generalizations and leave it up to the reader to go, "HEY THATS ME ITS TALKING ABOUT!" while skipping past the parts that have nothing to do with them. This is kind of how those so-called psychics work. They throw out a lot of generalizations until something makes sense with someone.

On the other hand, they actually had my name in the same spelling. Which is kind of weird. They also said I'd be in a technical field of study. But I mean c'mon that's so easy to guess.