I’m sure many of you have heard about Noise Singapore and Timbre. The former is an initiative led by the National Arts Council which supports creativity among the youth here, and the latter is a chain of live-music restaurants/bars featuring local musicians.

Both entities are strong supporters of the growing music scene in Singapore and I was really excited when they joined hands to hold a competition for singer-songwriters.

Six aspiring artists stand a chance to be showcased at Timbre @ The Substation, as well as get a few music lessons thrown in. To take part, they will need to upload two video performances on YouTube, one of an original song and the other of a song of their choice.

I decided to take part, of course :), and I wanted to do a proper audio recording for this. So I got together with my friend Anthony Kok (who’s an extremely talented guitarist) and went down to Backbeat Studios in Jalan Besar last week. I booked a two-hour slot and we played two songs in a  “live” performance style. Adrian Ng, who owns the studio, did some some basic mixing for us, and Carol helped to record the video. All in, I was pretty pleased with the result!

The original song I submitted was “Bad Stuff Got You Good”, which I wrote for Carol to encourage her not to let the bad things in life get her down. Here’s the video:

You can check out the original home-recorded video of this song here.

The second song I sent in was a cover of “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I love this song and to me it speaks of the happiness and freedom found in doing what you love. Have a listen here:

Yup, those were my two videos. Wish me luck! Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think 🙂

If you’d like to take part as well, visit this link, and send in your videos! The contest closes on 6 Feb, 2011.