New Recording Equipment, McDonald’s Vouchers and Catching Up With Friends

New Recording Equipment
I’m very excited about the new recording equipment I purchased. Over the last year, I’m been experimenting with recording and trying to build up my technical skills. After a fair amount of trial and error, I’ve gotten better at engineering my recordings (though I admit I still have a long way to go).

Recently, I purchased a Rode NT4 mic and a Tascam US144 MK II audio interface and I was blown away by the audio quality of the test recordings I made. It was significantly better than the Zoom H4 recorder I was using.

Props to Marcus Loh for the inspiration. I’ve always admired the fantastic audio quality he manages to obtain when he produces content for Kevin.

I will be rerecording some old material and will be recording some new material. When I started recording, I started slowly and cautiously because  I had plenty to learn. Now that I have more experience, I hope to record much more material.

This isn’t the end of my technological experimentation. I still have some tricks up my sleeves and I’m hoping to experimenting with other stuff I can’t reveal yet.

McDonald’s Vouchers
Remember when I participated in a Dell facebook survey and won a pair of movie tickets? When it rains, it pours, because I recently won some McDonald’s vouchers when I was one of the first 15 users to comment on their facebook page when they hit 150,000 fans.

I was supposed to share the vouchers with my colleague Jac, but as you can see from the photo below, I only received a handful of vouchers (about $15 worth of freebies) and I kinda used it up the weekend I received it… Sorry Jac :P.

As a Social Media and Communications Specialist, I’m constantly ‘plugged-in’ to facebook and new media, so it’s easy for me to respond to things like this. And this is where I shamelessly plug Nanyang Polytechnic’s facebook page. Remember to ‘Like’ the page!

Catching up with friends
Guitar Testing with Jessphine, HN and Jerome
Despite my nightmarish schedule, I’m trying to make the effort to catch up with my friends and acquaintances. A couple of weeks back, I had lots of fun trying guitars with Jessphine, HN Lim and his Jerome.

I was particularly taken with Jerome’s Esteve Manual Adalid guitar. It was considerably better than the last one I tried and unquestionably my favorite of the bunch.

Kevin Loh’s “Postcards from Home”

Speaking of guitars, I managed to attend Kevin Loh’s “Postcards from Home” performance at the Esplanade concourse. It was an enjoyable performance and we are very lucky to have public performances of rare works (Kevin performed some Piazolla for guitar with flute with the excellent flautist Rit Xu) at the always-charming Esplanade. Make sure you catch Kevin’s next performance the next time he’s in town.

I managed to chit chat with Kevin a little bit after his performance, but I didn’t want to monopolize his time. I’m sure there were plenty of others who wanted to speak to him. I was also glad to see that he had recovered from the chicken pox.

Lunch with Daniel
I also managed to meet Daniel, an old buddy of mine, for a rather rushed lunch at Manhattan Fish Market. I was attending a course in the Bugis area and Daniel was back in Singapore for a few days for a friend’s wedding so we decided to meet at Bugis+.

I met Daniel at Ngee Ann Polytechnic where we were both in Ngee Ann Polytechnic Strings. It’s nice to have a friend that you share such a long history with and it’s always nice catching up. I hope we can work on some music the next time he’s in town.

Dinner and Beer with the Army buddies
Is it possible to have dinner with army buddies without any alcohol? No.

I don’t like going back for In-Camp Training (ICT), but fortunately my buddies James, Eng Soon and Felix make the experience more tolerable. We’re thick as thieves and we use the time to play DaiDi talk about everything under the sun.

The deep conversations get really deep and the dirty jokes are remarkably filthy. Just another case of men behaving badly.

It was nice having dinner and drinks with them at Clarke Quay as opposed to the army camp cookhouse. In a strange reversal of our usual dining habits, I finished all of my food while the usually voracious James did not. I suspect that James prefers cookhouse food over regular food. He should have signed on.

Dinner at Barossa with Jeremy
A few months ago, I bought 2 Groupons for Barossa. Apparently it was really popular, because they had to extend the validity date due to overwhelming response. Eventually I had to make a reservation 3 weeks in advance.

Jeremy Zhou (co-founder of the Singapore Guitar Show and my occasional partner in crime in the guitar department) are finally going down tomorrow. I expect a food coma to ensue.