British School Talent Show (Creativity)

British School Talent Show (Creativity)

As for my other band, blood brothers, we were asked to be the guest performers for a talent show organized by the British school. For this concert as a whole band we practiced only 4 times which was not enough for us to play to out best potential. The songs we were going to do were Entersand man by Metallica, Living on a prayer by Bon jovi and Knocking on heavens door. We decided to play knocking on heavens door on the last day of out practice and i had to learn two new solos for this song which was a hard task to complete.

For this my goals were to
- Show commitment and perseverance which meant that i had to show up to all the practices on time and I have to be determines to what i am doing which meant that practicing other than just the practice times, and getting the solos almost to perfect or at least good enough to perform on stage.

- Work collaboratively with other band members, which meant to help them out when needed and also listen to what they have to say about me so that i could improve and this is exactly what i did when we were in practices.

We performed and i have to admit it was the best we have ever sounded as a band. I was really happy with my performance as well as the whole bands performance. I think the whole band was really happy with what we managed to accomplish with having just 4 band practices. I learned a lot from this experience as well and one of the main one was that being punctual is very important in being a successful band.

Battle of the Bands (creativity)

Battle of the Bands (Creativity)

Battle of the bands is a concert organized by Cleft pallet the CAS and it is a competition where 5 bands compete and which is something that "Still Thinking" has being practicing for the past few weeks. How the competition works is that every band gets 15 minutes, and the bands can fit any amount of songs in that 15 minutes. Then the bands have to perform in front of a panel chosen by the cleft pallet group and this panel is usually people who has being in the Sri Lankan music industry for a long time. They judge the bands in a criteria also provided by cleft pallet.

My first goal for the whole concert was to come up with a line up. I had already to talked to Bryce, he has being the drummer for still thinking for a long time and i still needed to find rhythm guitarist, a bassist and a vocalist, as the former band members left the band or were not in the country. So i asked around school to find a bassist and i heard Yo from the grade below was a bassist. So what i did was i told him to learn the songs that i was planning on doing for the concerts which was a Maldivian instrumental song called "your betrayal" by Fasy live and "Ecstacy of gold" by Metallica. Both of these songs are tricky songs but yo managed to get a hold of the two songs fairly easily so my next job was to find a rhythm guitarist and a vocalist. I asked the vocalist from my other band if he would be interested in playing with us, he said he will play with us if he can play the rhythm guitarist, and he managed to find a vocalist fairly easily and my first goal was achieved easily. So the line up was Me on lead guitar, yo on the bass, Prabodhya on rhythm guitar and Ray on vocals.

The main goal in our practice sessions were to practice the songs as much as we can, and to do this i had work collaboratively, with the rest of the band. I also had to show Commitment and perseverance which meant that even with all my school work i had to show up to practice on time and give my full focus onto practicing. From all these practices i managed to also Develop my skills in playing guitar as well as the bass because I learned the bass line that was for the Maldivian song as there are no Tabs online that we can follow so we had to learn the song the old school way by listening.

The Concert day came up and all of us were really excited to play and show what we have been practicing for the past few weeks. We got to play 3rd last. Before i went on stage, the goals that i set to accomplish was firstly to have fun and have a good time, secondly it was to win the competition and play with no mistakes
thirdly work collaboratively  and be as synchronized with the rest of the band as possible.

We played really well and we came of the stage with a big smile on our faces, the songs we played were Ecstasy of Gold to your betrayal and then seven nation army by white stripes. Although we didn't win we had a great time and in our hearts we won so that's all that counts, but i was happy to come second and i think the rest of the band was also happy.

I learned a lot from this experience, like i learned that having fun and having a good time is much more important than winning and i think that i accomplished thee two goals. I also learned to have a little faith in others when working collaboratively with others, because in the practices Yo did make a lot of mistakes when playing the songs but on that night his mistakes were to a minimum.

Habitat Build (Service)

Habitat Build (10th of November)

Background Information

The family we are going to help is the Ranjith Family. Ranjith is the father of two a daughter and a son. The daughter attends school but the son is too young to attend school. He lives in Minuwangoda which is 1 hour and 30 minutes from school. Ranjith fell from a tree and he legs are paralyzed, and he has being lying on the bed for the past 8 years. At the moment the whole family is living in a very small shed, with no walls or rooms. The pictures are shown below.




As you can see from the pictures they are living in very critical condition. They have no walls, and if it rains all the stuff would also get wet. I cant set the goals until we go and see the place we are working at which we will be going on the 10th of November which is a Saturday.





The Build

We were asked to go to school at 7.00 in the morning, and we left the school at 7.30. when we got there it was around 9 o clock and just as we went to the place we got a very warm welcome and we got straight to work.

The goals i set before i started working were

- Work collaboratively with the local people and also with the other people who came with us on the build.

- Learn how to use new equipment.

- Get as much done as possible.

We got to the place and I noticed that the place they were living was in a very critical condition and a place that no one should live, I also saw the house they were building and it was about half way done but still there were a lot of things to do such as putting the foundation for two rooms, and the builders who are already there were building the walls. The job we were asked to do was to flatten out two rooms that were filled with sand and to get the rocks out of a sand bank. In order to complete this as fast and as efficiently as possible, what we did was we divided ourselves into two groups and one group worked on filtering all the rocks from the sand bank and the other group flatten the two rooms. and there were more people working on flattening the two rooms as it needed more man power. I was assigned to shovel all the sand and to put it into a container. As this is not my first build i had some experience in shoveling and from experience i knew this was going to be hard work and something that takes time so without wasting any time i started to shovel all the sand out.  As a team we managed to finish one room by tea break. After having tea and some bananas we went straight back to work and everyone worked on finishing the other room. This room had more work to be done as there were a lot of sand in it. This time we took turns in doing all the jobs and i got to do all the jobs which was shoveling, hitting the sand so it is soft and the transporting the sand and throwing it into the next room which needed more sand. By lunch time we were done with that room and we had done about 4 or more solid hours of good hard work. After lunch we were all very tired and we all were ready to go home but we still had one other task we had to accomplish which was to filter the rocks out from the sand. We managed to finish half of the sand, but because one of the people who came with us got sick we had to end out trip early and head home, i wasn't complaining much as i think i have done a lot of work and i think i have contributed a lot to the family.  From this build as with a lot of other builds i learned a lot, I learned to work with others and also to work collaboratively with the local community.

Electric Funeral Concert (Action and Creativity)

Electric Funeral

Electric funeral is a concert organized by a guy called Lasith Fernando, he is a very well known guy in the music industry in Sri lanka. This concert was held in New auditorium Theater, the tickets were 400 rs and on the day of the concert a lot of people showed up. Every band got 45 minutes to play, which meant that as a band we had to play any amount of songs that would fit into 45 minutes, this also included the set up time on stage. I played guitar for a band called "Blood Brothers". we played 4 songs of which i played in three of them and i played lead guitar for the three songs. In order to be perfect we had to practice a lot, but unfortunately due to people having other plans we only got practice as a whole band 3 times, but the practices we did were very good and long practices which lasted about 6 hours to 4 hours.

 We were told to go to sound check at 12 o clock in the afternoon. We went there on time for the sound check as from experience our whole band knew that sound check is very important to sound good. Unfortunately the sound guy arrived at 3 o clock and the concert was meant to start at 5 o clock which meant that only two bands got the sound check, and the bands that got to do the sound check were the headlining two bands, a band called "Rage" and "Angel Down". From the sound check we knew that the two headlining bands were very good and i personally got very intimidated to play. There was nothing to do but suck it up and do my best and contribute to the band.

 The goals i set before i played the concert were

- To show perseverance and commitment, because eventhough we got to practice as a band only 3 times, I did practice alone for a long time and also with the other guitarist, as we both had to get our timings right.

- One other goal was also to work collaboratively with the rest of the band. Which meant helping them out in learning the guitar parts and also accepting help from the other band members.

- My goal was also to develop my guitar skills, as the band i was playing for was very good it was a very good chance for me to learn from them.

- I also had to be aware of my strengths and weaknesses in this area, and to keep my strengths going and to do my best to improve my weaknesses. One of the weaknesses i notice was my stage presence, this has always being a problem for ever since my first band. The only way to improve on my stage presence was to watch other people play like Metallica as there stage presence has bee always very good. And that's what I did, i watched a lot of concerts from you tube and  i tried to improve my stage presence.

 

The song list for us was Living on a prayer by Bon Jovi, Enter sandman by Metallica and the evil that men do by Iron Maiden. Below is a video of us playing Enter sandman by Metallica.