Performance at HDB Community Week
Last Thursday, my a cappella/beatbox crew Little Red Dots went for a performance as part of the HDB Community Week celebrations. It was a 30 minute set in the afternoon, outdoors (under a shelter though), and it was h-h-h-HAWTTT (mostly because we turned up the heat with our kickass performance!!!!!) We had a great emcee and sound guy though, and a nice crowd that cheered for us, and it was so nice to perform there 🙂
Yes, this is the only photo we took, and it was during soundcheck. LOL.
A little backstory on this gig:
Actually one of our members couldn’t make it for the gig. So we were going to go in as a three member group, and had to come up with all new arrangements for three people instead of our usual four. Then suddenly… another person couldn’t make it!!! So we held an open audition for someone to sub the person.
Quite a few people came to audition, and we’re very happy and grateful for the turnout… but after the auditions we realized that it’s Really Difficult to sub an a cappella singer whose parts are not scored, but improvised and then fixed afterwards by memory lol. (Yes, a little insight into the esoteric ways in which our a cappella-ish group thing works.)
We did manage to find a sub in the end, from within the a cappella / show choir community. But that sure was a lesson learnt, that a cappella singers who can improvise parts sure are difficult to substitute!
(Oh, and if you haven’t seen or heard Little Red Dots before, here’s a video we made:)
One thing we realized during the rehearsal process is that it’s very difficult to do a cappella with just three people (essentially only two people singing). So we had initially held aspirations of doing some incredible mindblowing arrangements like Freedoms Boombox:
Or even something simpler like this:
(Okay I am obviously a huge Freedoms Boombox fangirl but I guess these two videos are more than enough for you guys HAHA)
Anyway, the point is, we realized we are not Freedoms Boombox or anything close. So we scrapped the idea and went with a loop pedal. Which worked out great!
I have some video footage of our gig somewhere, so I’ll post an example or two up on my YouTube channel soonish. Meanwhile, many thanks to the very talented John Khoo from John and Deneice Glee Studios for performing this gig with myself and Jacky aka JK47! Hope we can perform together again in future 😀
Yeaa!