I Alex who have been playing guitar since June 2007. I remember the time my dad gave me my first guitar it was an acoustic Yamaha F-210. The moment I got it I asked my step mom to tune it as she had some guitar experience. So being pretty much a self-thought guitarist, used ultimate-guitar.com for guitar notes. At first they made no sense to me, but after searching a little bit I learnt how to read tabalature and started making music with my fingertips. Was a great feeling. I asked my friend's guitar teacher Mr.Pankaj to teach me so he thought me how to read and play chords and also thought me how to sing in key. In the school's guitar classes, knew how to play everything and hence people knew about the fact that i played guitar. That reminds me of taking part in playing Christmas carols with the school's choir. I used to browse youtube for artists. Rock and Metal music caught my eye and that was the moment when I said to myself that I want to sound like that.
My dad got me an electric guitar it was an Ibanez RGR321EX along with a Marshall MG30DFX amplifier and a ZOOM G2.1u effects processor. The moment I got it I started playing songs like "Breaking The Law" by "Judas Priest" was really nice to be able to sound the same as my favorites and was a great achievement. Well playing alone I realized that it would get me nowhere so decided to form a band, after trying to find interested people in my school I found my classmates to be interested. Yugendu a friend who had prior drum practice and Karan who played guitar and sang. The common thing between us was the same music influences and preferences which made it it easier for us. We practiced with the school's drumset and got to play live at school. So we played easy songs like "Paranoid", "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams", "21 Guns" people seemed to like them and was great fun and a sense of achievement. Yet I wanted a bigger audience and wanted more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv1wgUJM8z8
I met two of my friends through other friends as they gave them my mobile number and knew about our common interests. Tanveer a guitarist and Harsh a drummer. Harsh has been a big influence for me as I have learnt a lot of things from him. So we usually jammed at Tanveer's house, we also involved other people in our jam sessions, along with the music we had a lot of fun. But we weren't getting anywhere. One day Harsh and I were supposed to go to Tanveer's place to jam but we apparently did not go, instead we recorded a soundtrack. We simply used the effects processor as the audio interface (Zoom G2.1u) and I had some little prior experience on how to use DAW's like Audition and FL Studio which all together came in handy. So by midnight the recording was done and was uploaded and was named OFS and on the same day we named this project Rain Stealer. Thanks to facebook, youtube and other such networks our music was shared and people heard our tracks, not that people liked them but we were in the spotlight.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rain-Stealer/189618284106
Things were going nice we managed to record 4 soundtracks along with vocals. But then came a moment where our ego's clashed and we ended all the ongoing work. What was done is still out there but no more work was done on the project. Now that I had no one to play with, just played songs and tried composing on my own. One lovely day I remember getting a message on facebook from my favourite Ahmedabad's band's guitarist Sheldon which read :
hey. our band needs a guitarist to play with us for mirage gig... if u know any 1 who plays metal pls lemme know.. also if u wana play u can..
So before jamming together for the first time, the set-list was already decided, so I practiced the songs well. The moment we plugged in our gear we were playing the songs really well. We practiced songs by "Iron Maiden" , "Judas Priest" and "Metallica" for an upcoming show in less than 2 weeks time. But that was a plenty of time for us.
http://www.facebook.com/MMSBand
It was the day to get on stage, so we met at the drummer's place for a final jam and were on the way to the event. We arrived there and were watching other bands perform. My friends from Tritone Events; Ian, Sid and many others are the ones who contributed in making this amazing show. It was a big thing for the city as there were not many other ongoing Rock or Metal shows around. We were the third band to go on stage, the moment the bands name was mentioned "Murder My Sweetheart" all the Metal music fans came charging to the front of the stage. As everyone was getting ready I played some famous solos and riffs that made the crowd happy. It was about time to start playing so we started off with the sound-check track which was "Living After Midnight" by "Judas Priest". As soon as the drummer started hitting his set, the crowd started headbanging. That is what you get for not having Metal music in town for a while. We started our set with "Aces High" by "Iron Maiden" which really uplifted the crowd's mood, some of them even started a mosh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD3rDgB8QDc
The on-stage effects like the various lights and smoke, a very lively audience and the loud sound from the monitors all this together made this an unforgettable experience. We continued the live show with "For Whom The Bell Tolls" by "Metallica" and "Breaking The Law" by "Judas Priest". Later the crowd demanded us to play "Hallowed Be Thy Name" by "Iron Maiden". All you could hear was everyone screaming "Hallowed". It was nice to see many of my friends in the crowd, many people taking pictures and others simply enjoying themselves. This makes it the proudest moment of my life and would like to thank everyone for letting me experience something like this especially "Murder My Sweetheart" for letting me play with them and everyone else who supported me.
