yo wassup

well fred thinks i should tell u how i got this job.... any way i played a wedding in eureka and after not getting paid it made me realize that i'll never make enough money musically to survive in eureka alone. My friend Merrill had always said i should play on a cruise ship.. so after the wedding and not getting paid, and then a few weeks later STILL not getting paid i applied online to Carnival, Princess, and Proship.com. The most extensive interview process was proship.com. However the job i got first was with Carnival and since they paid a bit more than proship.com (which works with several major cruise lines...) i opted for Carnival. Plus perhaps not every single person on Carnival will be a geezer since the ships are aimed at younger people and kids i thought it might be a bit more fun... I was so busy with the interview process with proship and carnival that i never even replied back to the email from Princess wanting my set list of songs i could play. In fact, during the scheduled time of my first phone and play interview with Carnival, i was talking to Andre from proship on the phone and had my mom tell Padraic from Carnival to call me back. Luckily he did, and i got the gig even though i was late for the interview.... ;)

So here goes.. i leave on Saturday at 6am and it is tuesday now.. i have been having a boatload of gigs lately so hopefully i will be in good playing shape. Oh yeah, the interview process: They email you music exactly one hour before they call you. so you have to print it out and only get a few minutes to look at it and then you have to play it for them when they call. In the case of proship, you have to video yourself playing it as well and talk to them on the phone. Plus proship had me learn and video a bunch more stuff after the phone call and send it in later, which honestly was a slight nightmare. Because of the ancientness of my dads video camera, it took me several hours to figure out how to convert the files, which first of all werent even showing up on the camera... :(

The highlight of that experience was that i picked Lovesong by Sarah Bareilles which my sister Joelle sang and we sent that in as one of the bazillion types of songs they asked me to record. And then there was the episode of having to download mp3s of the songs proship sent me and convert those to wav files, burn them to a disc, and play them on a cdplayer loud enough to be heard over the piano. The ONLY one in my parents house where the piano is, is my dad's karaoke machine. Problem: although it was plenty loud, everything was a HALF STEP off! so after converting the mp3 files, burning the disc, printing out the sheet music with my parents ancient and slow printer with paper getting constantly jammed, it took me the last few minutes of my hour "practice time" to get the karaoke machine to play in the right key. So basically i bombed the wacky time-signature-changing-key-signature-changing blazing fast jazz charts they sent, because i had about 4 milliseconds to look at them before the phone rang... ;)

The carnival interview was a lot easier. Even though i thought i flunked it, Padraic said i passed.. whew..... ;)