I had a few enjoyable moments in the last few days. The first is that I sent my final -...maybe - version of my first piano piece to my vocal coach. She really seemed to like the initial versions but was far more excited for my most recent revision. She brought it up during our session yesterday and kept saying how much she loved the melody. More excitingly, she said how if she came across anyone at work (she's a professional song writer as I believe I've mentioned) needing a moody melody, she'd totally pitch my piece to them. Which is pretty freakin' cool. I don't expect anything to come of that but it was a nice confidence boost.
Secondly, I managed to climb my way (slightly) both up and down the piano with my voice more than I ever have before, which I didn't expect having thought I'd hit my absolute limit prior to this. As of now it's looking like my range will officially land around 3 octaves or perhaps a step more. Here is what I was able to eek out yesterday.
Compared to my previous record:
I actually managed to land the B just below my lowest C but not reliably and it was a real struggle, requiring me to attempt it again and again until I just barely managed. So I'm not going to count that one.
Next goal: don't screw up my recital in a few weeks. I did a few runs through it on the grand piano at the vocal studio and found some parts that needed tweaking, mostly pedal work. I've discovered being a little lax with the pedal at home on my electric piano is a lot different than being lax on a real piano. The sounds muddle FAR more on the piano and I'm going to have to make sure I'm more diligent about the pedal in the future.
To go along with my previous post, I have nearly finished up my first ever song, aside from the lyrics. Though at this point I might just make it an instrumental...maybe. It's an ever changing situation and my mind switches every few minutes.
After I had settled on most of the melodies and chorus, I recorded it and sent it to my vocal instructor - who is a professional song writer - for her opinion. Her response was: "Whoa!! That is sooo cool!! You have a real ear for melody lines - no joke - I could totally picture that in a movie - wow!!!"
Which naturally pleased me. Granted, she could have been trying to encourage me with positive reinforcement but I feel like she tends to be very straight-forward so I'm going to take the comment as stated and allow myself to feel pretty excited about it.
Now that I've finally started the ball rolling and allowed the fear of being terrible to subside, I'm really enjoying the progress of creating a song. Of creating at all, really. It feels like far too long since I said down and made something that was my own.
I don't know if my writing method is ideal, but I recorded the basic chord progression onto my phone and listened to it on a loop over and over (which may have driven me slightly insane) while humming melody progressions in my head. After a while, I started to hear where I wanted the song to go in my a measure ahead of time and I would build it from there. It sort of felt like those cartoons where a character starts to off a cliff and builds a bridge ahead of themselves to run on while they are in midair.
I always assumed the first song I ever wrote would be terrible - and it MAY be for all I know - and that I would hate it. But the fact that I not only don't hate it, but actually like it makes me feel pretty good.
There are still many hurdles and a long way yet to go, but I'm glad to finally have making the journey.
I was playing recital piece for my piano teacher last week and she commented on how my play style had evolved from being stiff and mechanical to more loose and how I seemed to play with more feeling of late and how she felt I'd become a real musician. And that just made my whole day.
I, of course, don't feel that way but it's nice hearing it from someone else.
I have a two week deadline to complete an entire song. Music, lyrics, the works. Not to be misleading with the use of the word "deadline", which implies ramifications if I don't complete it. There are no ramifications beyond personal displeasure and potentially disappointing my vocal coach, being the person who tasked me with this undertaking. That being said, consequences or no, I'd like to complete it. It may be terrible and it may be embarrassing, but it will be finished, and that is an achievement of sorts. By being complete I'll be able to leave it behind and try again, hopefully making my next attempt slightly less horrifying. Then I'll repeat the process a few hundred times until I hopefully have something mildly passing. Or more ideally I'll discover I'm a natural prodigy and write a masterpiece, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that one.
Having already squandered half of my two weeks, I recently realized why I'm struggling to make more progress. I'm spending a lot of time on minute details that probably don't matter. Or don't matter at this stage in the process, at least.
Last night I spent an agonizing amount of time on 4 measures for the ending. My working on the ending is in no way indicative of my progress through the song, by the by. I just happened to have noodled with a melody that I felt would sound good as an ending. At any rate, in measure 1 and 3, there is literally a single note that is interchanged between the two, and only by a single tone. And I couldn't for the life of me decide which I preferred. The change is so slight that when I sent it to a friend for an opinion, I was told, "I listened to both samples a few times and can't tell any difference," which makes me believe no one but a professional musician or someone with a very refined ear would even care, so why am I tearing my hair out about this?
Besides, I've decided that I need to try and treat song writing as I would a painting. A simple base layer to start with then slowly and steadily adding more and more details until it is full of texture and, by the time you are finished, becomes interesting. Hopefully.
I'm only now coating the base with color and am a long way from painting any sort of sunset. I'll try and get the colors right when I get there instead of worrying about them while it is still early morning.
Over the last year I've noticed a rather obnoxious disconnect between any music I play and what my brain is doing at any given moment during the piece. From the start of this piano learning process, one thing I focused on extensively was never looking at my fingers. The practice has served me well, but I've recently discovered - as I learn more difficult pieces that take me longer to learn - that it can cause me to become lost should I ever make a mistake. I used to be rather good at making a mistake and continuing on like nothing happened, which I imagine was a hold-over from my guitar days. But recently I've started to pause upon making an error and that gives my brain JUST enough time to activate and confuse everything. It made me realize that even if I know a piece by memory, I don't really know at any time what note I'm playing as I play it. That means if I've gotten my fingers out of position I have no idea where they are supposed to go without starting back a few measures. This can obviously be a problem.
Muscle memory is clearly an important skill with this instrument, but I feel my sole reliance on it has done me a disservice. I brought up the disconnected feeling randomly my vocal coach and she suggested that when I practice scales and arpeggios (the latter of which I rarely practice...I know, I know...) that I actively call out the name of the notes I'm hitting. My first thought was that this will also help with me oddly terrible ability to say the alphabet backwards from G. But I think she may be onto something. Having only tried this method a few times, I already feel that this is going to help me address the issue.
As I think on how long it took me to find a simple solution to my disconnect problem, it becomes quite clear to me that I need to come up with other similar efficient practice techniques if I ever want to rise above piano mediocre. My progress has been beyond disappointing of late and it's frustrating. I need a renewed effort on more efficiency and deliberate practice. If I can get those working in tandem I believe it will really boost my progress in the direction I want.
In other news, I sang the first part of a song in front of someone for the first time, and it was absolutely terrifying. All these times I've worked with the vocal coach, I have only been focusing on technique and exercises, forever pushing off attempting a real song. Okay, that's not quite true. To ease me into the process, we've often worked on the below:
Which I've gotten pretty good at, if I may be so bold. Though obviously not quite as good as Pavarotti. But singing a song in a language you don't know is pretty on par with doing various technique exercise. It's a lot easier to really throw yourself into it when it just comes out as a bunch of sounds. When it comes out as understandable words, that's when the doubt and fear and such really sets in. With that in mind, when the first word of the new song I worked on came out as little more than a squeak, I wasn't really surprised. I'm not discouraged though as I think on how far I've progressed since my first lesson. In the beginning, even jibberish sounds were hard to make myself do at any reasonable volume; even more difficult were the many strange exercises that make you look completely ridiculous.
It took a while to become comfortable with all of that, but these days I don't think twice about having to hold my hands to my face and squish my cheeks up in weird ways so that I can trill my lips to get the sound I want. Or, as last time, stick a spoon to the back of my tongue and force it to stay flat when trying to make an "AH" sound. But a year ago I'd have folded in on myself in embarrassment.
Those trials have certainly changed my view on how I think about singers when I see them make silly faces during performance. I used to just think, "that's not a good look for them" but now it just makes me realize they are applying some technique or another to their voice. It's been very enlightening.
Whatever ends up coming out of the time spend in these classes, I feel at the very least it has been good for my self-confidence.
For some reason, I decided all the stuff I was working on just wasn't enough to keep me busy, so I ended up buying a ukulele to fool around with. I figured having a fair bit of experience with stringed instruments, it would come to me more naturally than piano did. And for the most part that is true, but having big hands and trying to play this tiny instrument is certainly a learning experience.
For all the years I've loathed "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", it has rapidly become a secret favorite after playing it on the uku. With that easy chore down, I decided to skip all the logical steps and try and master "Bohemian Rhapsody" which is clearly a ridiculous move.
...but can you blame me?
All I've managed thus far is to blister every single finger even with the ukulele's nylon strings. Thi is clearly showing a lack of practice on the guitar of late.
Difficult as the song is, it has been a lot of fun to play. Try to play, rather. After a bit of concentrated effort, I have the first 30 seconds handled...only about 5.5 more minutes of song to go. I should have it mastered in a few years at this rate.
It's been a busy year. Keeping an updated blog that only ~3 people read is more work than anticipated, especially on a topic that doesn't lend itself to being put into words.
Here's what has been going down.
1) I've had two recitals since the last time I updated, which tells you how far between my updates have been. Or that I have recitals too often. But I've grown to enjoy the recitals. After all, one of my goals was to play in front of people, though a recital isn't exactly what I had in mind, nor is playing a piece out of a lesson book. Still, it's progress and a step toward one of my goals.
The last recital I played my most challenging piece thus far, an upbeat ragtime song. And while I'm not a ragtime fan, I loved playing the piece, especially in front of a bunch of strangers. I get the expected butterflies before a recital but when I actually play I completely zone out and forget about everyone else. I didn't even notice a cameraman got right in my face. I'm told my gaze gets "focused, intense, and angry". The furrowed brow isn't anger, just concentration. I don't really recall being up on the stage except for feeling completely in sync with the piece, and that was a nice, rare moment.
2) I was in New York for a week this month for a wedding and made some pretty great new friends. I danced terribly out on the dance floor and had a great time when I was finally able to not worry about other people and just enjoy myself. Who knew dancing (even badly) was such fun? Have I really been missing out all these years because I was embarrassed? One of my new goals for the year is to learn to dance with some fast tempo songs so I can keep up with one of my new friends, Justin, who danced everyone's face off.
My other new buds are a husband and wife duo who are both musically inclined. When they found out I played a few instruments, they wanted to break out the instruments. He plays bass and she the violin. I played them some pieces I'd done before as well as a new one I was working on, and they played me an incredible cover of a Coheed and Cambria song that they are doing for an upcoming talent show, which I desperately hope they record. After that we just sort of goofed off, singing songs and jamming. I was reminded just how much fun it is to play music with people. It'd been far too long.
3) I played a ukulele for the first time and found it to be quite the pleasant little instrument. Playing it felt very naturally and I taught myself a few songs in an hour or so. I think I might pick up my own for fun.
Speaking of which, after I found out they had a uku, I shared with them a fantastic player I had just seen a few weeks prior.
All in all, a very eventful few months and I'm feeling quite inspired. Can't wait to see what the rest of the year brings.
