A Gold for our sweat......

TAKE AWAY MY PAIN......as i was singing these lines in netaji, i was sweating profusely and i felt a bit giddy. There was too much of stress on me at that time. Much was at stake, and the competition was very very stiff. But we did it finally and i was as much happy yesterday as i had never been in the history.Reason????.......RK won a gold in an entertainment group event after I dont know how many years.And that victory was in western groups, which was one of the tuffest nuts to crack given the fact that every hall had something to give a stiff competition to us.While our strongest competitor RP had a dreaded line up of apro, kartik, mohit, vinod, andre;Azad had rathore;llr had podu n mukul.And all of the above 3 halls produced a great show.

For the last 5 days, my wingmates had been calling me "halu", "frustu". Reason?I had been very loaded thinking about every single details about the whole thing.Let me recount all that i did, so that i or my juniors can revisit them sometime later in the future.

1>Song Selection :- We took care of the fact that we dont select any song which uses any heavy metal patch (MT ) .Funda was simple.....such kind of distortion has never sounded good in netaji on Abir da's sound system (unless u have a really costly processor).Especially when u have a time constraint there in mind in sound checking

2>Sounds:- We had taken 2 amps for the 2 guitars to be used.While sound patch setting, we adjusted the volume knobs of the 2 amps such that for the same volume parameter(say 18) on the 2 processors, the volume level comes out the same on both guitars.Taking it as the reference we adjusted the leads volume and patch accordingly.Also care was taken that once the volume level of the first song(smoke on the water) is set, then the volume level of the other songs to follow come out in the right amount automatically.This strategy worked perhaps as they say that the sound was very properly balanced in all the songs.

3>Showmanship:- Sunday morning was the Bong drams lights practice.We leveraged this opportunity. Me, Ashish, Nishad, Sudeep were there in the netaji to have a look at what all we can do with the light system available there. We made much plans there and thanks to the lights team (aayush and Co.) that they implemented all of them beautifully.

4>Vande Mataram Intro:- This really brought out some effect. Me, Ashish and Laddha worked out the leads of this intro at 2 am in the nite, just before the event.And Ashish and Laddha executed this beautifully on the final day.

5>Uniform:- We had thought initially to have some kind of uniform. But RP were very clever in leveraging their second slot position by being the first team to come in formals in judges' eyes. Any other team that wud have come out doing the same wud have been viewed as copy cats in the judge's eyes(althought the idea originally belongs to Nehru). So we dropped the idea of having any uniformity in our dresses as we believed that all the 4 teams on the second day wud be following the herd. We just had our lead guitarist ashish and vishal dressed differently, while me , KC and ion were sporting whites. Guess wat.....we got 5 out of 5 in showmanship :)(offcourse the credit goes to the lights team more than anybody else).

On a more sentimental note, i would like to devote this Gold to Denzel, the erstwhile lead guitarist of RK who first showed us the importance of playing clean music.

Also, my personal regards for Dash, who inspite of being an avid follower of DEATH METAL drumming came out to play single bass for all the songs with us setting perfect example of team-spirit for others to follow.On an even more sentimental note, suddenly in the morning i realised that this was perhaps my last show with ashish and dash, and i m surely going to miss them so much.

Thank You!!!