singing

voiced concerns

November 11, 2011 by krisis

Last night at about 9:10pm I lost my voice. I have yet to locate it this morning.

I’ve learned that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to rehearsing while under the weather. It happens to everyone, and it can feel good to make some music when you feel run down, but better to have your voice for a performance than blow it showing off at rehearsal.

Except, we were rehearsing “Better.” It’s nowhere near the highest or most-difficult vocal I’ve written for myself, but it has an obscene degree of difficulty for me when fronting the whole band. Lots of words. Lots of quick melodic jumps. And then there are the Bs – I have to hit three of them dead on during each chorus to support our new three part harmony – 12 in total. Due to where that note falls in my range, I tend to both be flat and push too hard. (Contradictory, I know).

Anyhow, last night by 9:10pm I had maybe noticed some chinks in my voice when I had no falsetto to switch to in “Dumbest Thing I Could Do,” but on the whole I thought I had been relatively cautious. Then came the final “Better” of the night. Verse one went fine, but in the chorus the Bs were murder. Verse two was raspy and kindof hot sounding, but the second chorus pushed my voice to the brink. I was barely getting on top of the Bs, and it was a Herculean effort to sustain them and keep them nice and sharp.

Afterwards, in the bridge, my voice was barely there, even with my face pressed right up against the microphone, absorbing tiny electric shocks. By the time we reached the third one I was kindof just emceeing the song. “Cause we were so!” I would bark, and then Gina and Jake would chime in harmoniously, “high!” Then, I would call “and I?” and they would respond like an elite military corps, “tried!”

By the time we crossed the finish line, my voice had completely disappeared. These things have been known to correct themselves overnight, but I awoke this morning with not even the barest squeak in my throat – and it even hurt to do that.

No talking for me today, or really over the weekend as a whole. Hopefully I get some semblance of it back by Tuesday for our spotlight at Studio Luloo.

Even if I do, I think I might stay away from “Better.”

The Human Calculator v. The Harmony Jukebox

May 24, 2010 by krisis

That would be a pretty dull superhero fight, huh?

Actually, the title refers to Friday’s post, which drew a quick comment from someone who built a straw-man of “The Human Spellchecker” to stand next to my snarky Human Calculator.

I’m so high-and-mighty about math, but do I use a spell-checker when I blog? Would I deny people a spellchecker too in my dedicated Ludditism?

The answers are, respectively, “occasionally” and “of course!” The existence of tools to assist us doesn’t replace the need to master skills or knowledge on our own.

Consider the source. I take for granted that I’m comfortable doing both of these things. I have to proofread words and numbers as part of both my jobs and my hobbies. It’s in my best interest to be a knowledgeable snob about both.

Maybe they aren’t the best examples for me.

I always say, “music is like calculus to me.” Yet, I’m a musician. I don’t have wonderful pitch, and I am not a natural singer. I can’t pluck perfectly in-tune harmony notes out of thin air like E or Gina, each of whom I refer to as “The Harmony Jukebox.”

When our band learns a new song I usually have to play along on piano at first, and when I sing harmony in the car E has to sing with me the first few times. And I have to pay careful attention to breath support, shaping, and phrasing to stay in tune.

At some point I have to sing the notes myself in an effortless way. If I never eliminated the piano, or E, or the careful attention to every note, I wouldn’t be much of a musician. I mean, yeah, they have auto-tune for that now, but what about performing live.

Bottom line: being a musician is hard work for me! Sometimes it isn’t any fun at all.

What if math was that hard for me? Would I sometimes just whip out the calculator? Probably. But just like music, I’d still want to know how to do it myself. I still want to possess that knowledge.

What about you? Forget grade-school antics like math and spelling. What is a difficult skill that you have to reproduce daily? Do you use a tool to assist you? And, can you still perform the same task without the tool?

Trolls Under the Bridge

January 27, 2010 by krisis

As I spend more time working on Social Media projects at work and at home, one of the most recurring topics is “Trolls.”

It’s a broad topic. Trolls can be anything from vociferous-but-reasonable dissenters to people with an agenda of annoyance and an axe to grind. Each species merits a different reaction.

The Air Force created a terrific Web Posting Response Assessment – effectively, a Troll Taxonomy Tool & Decision Tree – to aid in selecting a response. (Here is a PDF of a recent version, for your reference.)

It’s a great tool – it distinguishes between several layers of negative responses. There are true “Trolls” (negative purely for the sake of it), but also responders are who “Misguided” (negative based on incorrect info) and “Unhappy” (negative based on a corresponding negative experience).

This simple, one-page chart has been a sanity-saver on a few projects in 2009. It forced my teams to stop a cycle of second-guessing – evaluate, respond if-needed, and move on.

That’s why my thoughts went to the assessment last night, when I received a comment notification on one of my videos. The comment was to the effect of “this dude can’t hit a note.”

I tried to objectively place my responder in the tree. Clearly he had a negative experience listening to me. He’s also misguided, because I’m definitely hitting many notes quite well in the video, and his comment wasn’t subjective.

Ultimately, though, he’s just a garden-variety Troll – spreading negativity for some intangible reason it’s impossible to dispute. So, per the Air Force, I’ll monitor it, but won’t respond.

That’s the success of more than my crack Air Force training. Three or more years ago that sort of comment would cripple my confidence. I would probably apologize for his negative experience without ever assuming he was misguided. And I would stop playing the song, probably for months!

Yesterday, he just made me smile. These days I’m a lot bigger than one or ten trollish comments. I sound how I want to sound; if I didn’t, I would have never posted the video.

That’s the same confidence you must have in your brand to make good use of the Air Force tool. If you’re unsure of the product or service you’re offering, every dissent turns into a potentially reasonable complaint.

From there, it’s all apologies, and you’ll be overrun with Trolls.

Whuffaoke or Bust

July 27, 2009 by krisis

I don’t have it in me to articulate today’s adventures quite yet, but:

Whuffaoke is a country-spanning karaoke tour based out of one amazing winnebago. They are also some of the sweetest people I have ever met. Over the course of seven hours I sang “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Since U Been Gone,” “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Time Is Running Out,” “Don’t You Want Me,” and – amazingly, as I’ve never performed it before – “Here We Go Again” by Whitesnake.

In addition to not having it in me to articulate, I think I may have also lost the power of speech.

Whuffaoke continues on Monday at 13th and Sansom at 5pm sharp. Be there.

…and there was life

June 15, 2009 by krisis

My body is convinced that there are 27 hours in the day.

It will gladly absorb a requisite eight of sleep, but then it wants to stay up and about for a too-long 18 hours, plus a bonus hour to wind down to sleep.

I’ve long since been used to tricking myself into being tired, but I cannot always trick my brain into making a to-do list that can be completed before midnight.

Tonight was an epic amount of exercise, mixing for a top-secret freelance project, uploading brand new Arcati Crisis videos, chipping away at some freelance writing, and beginning the massive late-spring cleaning required to accommodate the hulking new digital audio workstation Gina and I lugged from her car on Saturday before a completely exhausting/exhaustive drumming rehearsal with Chas.

BTW, Arcati Crisis with drums is awesome. Just you wait.

If you have been wondering where the spiffy PM demos have gone, they are far from over. It’s just that I realized somewhere around 9:30 p.m. on June 7th that I haven’t had to contain many more than a dozen well-rehearsed, original, solo songs in my body all at once for several years – let alone contain them on top of my AC repertoire – and so it would be a stretch to assume there were another 46 good ones ready to tumble out daily for the rest of the month.

Also, there was the little matter of having completely worn through my dozen-years-in-the-making guitar calluses, a feat I’ve only accomplished a handful of times previously. Merrily, my vocals stayed strong throughout – more points towards the value of good voice instruction. Old-school me would have been croaking like a frog by day four.

(Also also, I was primed to miss out on some actual life in order to keep recording – including seeing good friends (and clients) play big shows, supporting local open mics, and communicating with my wife, amongst other things. Oh, and maybe a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon.)

(Don’t judge.)

Point being, I’ll be back with another run of of demos as soon as I have the time to rehearse them a bit, because scrabbling through a daily duo of tunes so barely-rehearsed that they hardly hang together sortof defeats the entire point of the project (i.e., to rehearse for my impending studio album and definitively/digitally put to rest some older tunes).

In the meantime, I am insanely happy with the results of the first seven days, particularly Saving Grace and Colorblind, both of which are intricate and in alternate tunings. Not ones I thought you’d hear in the first week.

Knowing my body and its various to-dos, I’m thinking sleepiness will arrive circa 1:50 a.m.