Accepting Limitations, Executing Your Solutions

With my band’s music video done and our live performance video currently in the works, I’m really pleased to say that things are working out for us. However, there are still problems that we’re battling against and I’m beginning to accept that for people like me and may pal Gifter, nothing is ever finished… unless of course if we decide to hang our capes and call it quits.

But the phrase “giving up” is nowhere to be found in Gifter’s vocabulary, that’s why for the next weeks, we will be even busier producing our live studio performance, doing some photoshoot for our social media page, and finally launching our official Youtube channel.

As we conduct all of those, there are huge constraints and hurdles that we need to deal with. Let’s talk about some of the limitations we believe we have, and how we made solutions to combat them.

Limitation: We’re not great singers

Though Gifter is evidently an arrogant brat every time he talks, he is honest enough to admit that he’s not a great singer. As a total newbie to all of these things we’re doing, I’m doing that same admission. “We’re just a male and female tandem who can fairly sing” – this is how we judge ourselves.

There’s a very vast ocean of great singers in the mainstream of music today. How can we ever compete against them? – Gifter would often ask this for both of us.

Solution: Precision playing, good diction, being in-tune

Though we don’t have an excellent vocal range like those professional singers out there, I can say that we have good diction and we can sing “in tune most of the time.” This, Gifter believes is already good enough for the general public.

One of the issues that floats around today’s pop-music scene is the “evil auto-tune” that many famous artists use. Though Gifter knows how to use this with his laptop and some software, he is completely against it.

Whenever we perform live in front of a crowd one day, he dreams of us becoming one of the best live-performance bands. This means that in every gig we do, we must sound really good and make people feel impressed that we are very skillful musicians.

I really hope that with those 3 months of practicing 5 days a week for 3 hours each time, I hope we already achieved that… fingers crossed.

Limitation: We’re just average-looking people

If you’ve read my previous article about that moment when we saw Ben & Ben perform live in our city, you might have remembered that Gifter felt so insecure about not looking as handsome as the Benjamin twins.

For the next weeks, he would ponder about it deeply and give himself some headaches just thinking about how to solve that “we need to look good” problem.

Having done countless of hours of research about the most successful music artists these days, Gifter had this understanding that the most good-looking artists often have the highest levels of attention accumulated.

Realizing that, he suggested this…

Solution: Cosplaying while performing

I mentioned in my previous article that Gifter had this rather silly (and stupid) strategy of cosplaying while performing. Though I’m adamantly against it, I conceded it’s a necessary silliness that I have to give in to. Gifter believes wearing superhero-ish costumes would make us look better on stage, and would make our videos more clickable.

He took inspiration from bands like KISS and Slipknot who wore silly but attention-grabbing masks and costumes. To prevent us from looking “kinda devilish” though, he suggested we should look like those superheroes from the comic books he loved as a kid.

Read my full article about our planned cosplaying here:

https://read.cash/@Jeaneth/gifters-foolishness-cosplaying-while-performing-8577665a

Limitation: Being just a duo

Initially, we thought of having just a guitar and a piano in the instrumentation of our songs. But realizing that it would make our songs very limited, we decided to improvise and use whatever technological tool we can have to still sound like a full alternative-acoustic band.

Solution: Using drum machines and digital background tracks.

Thanks to digital music tools that you can freely download today, any aspiring musician can avail of amazing, easy-to-use software that can make you sound like a full band though there’s just 2 of you, or even if you’re just a single performer.

In our planned live performance video, there will be songs that we will play with drum parts and bass guitar parts in them. But with our current setup, what you can actually expect to see will be Gifter playing his acoustic guitar while doing lead vocals and me playing my keyboards while doing some backup vocals.

To make us sound fuller and thicker, we’d employ a drum machine and a digital bass guitar track on the background. We downloaded a virtual drum machine that we can just play automatically in the background using my smartphone. This 2 tools will somehow perform the invisible parts of a drummer and a bassist.

With those solutions mentioned above, we hope we can still sound convincingly good enough. To be honest though, we believe we can still make a better output by finding a real human bassist and a drummer soon.

This is how we dealt with some of the hurdles and limitations that we’re so burdened with currently. Before you leave, I hope you’ll ponder upon the life lesson that his airness, Michael Jordan once said, “Limits, like fears are often just an illusion.”

Thanks for reading!

Keep safe everyone.