1/13/23
Sweet Baby James - James Taylor
I'm five days into singingwithjoeydotcom's 30-day sing everyday program and that's been fun. So far we're just doing raspberries, "aah"s and "ooh"s on a bunch of different intervals, and at the end of each warmup I feel like a boss. "Aah" 1-8-1 is a gnarly one
Sounding more confident and having more fun in the chorus
How about that off-script zinger on "song that they sing for their home to the sky" at 2:01 huh?! How bout that!
1/7/23
Golden Embers - Mandolin Orange
Just focused on just hitting all the pitches. Two particularly tricky moments
The melody starts with "like an old friend" on a second, C# over a B minor in the guitar
The first line of the chorus "if you can help me" walks from D to E to F#, while the guitar plays a G major, so stopping at the major seventh instead of going up to the tonic which feels more natural
"then yoooou can help me" at 0:58 sounds ugh - like fuzzy, closed off, trying too hard
"shine like golden embers in the night" at 2:22 sounds rushed and weary. I think the "night" sounds flat too. The guitar part right after takes some attention to nail, and so for sure I was just stressed about hitting that clean
The very beginning
For some context, here's two older videos I dug up from when I first started recording myself singing. In the two years in between recording these videos and starting this project I have:
Played a lot more music - guitar and piano now come more naturally which opens up brain power to focus on singing in the moment
Taken six voice lessons. In these lessons I learned the difference between head and chest voice, felt the impact of having warmed up your voice, been exposed to the concept of singing vowels differently/using different facial muscles to change sound and built some singing confidence
Started mapping out vocal melodies I'm learning on piano to help with actually hitting all of the pitches
Fun observation, when I uploaded these two videos to YouTube, the bots didn't recognize that they are copyrighted material (they did recognize that with each of the the videos above) ... pretty undisputable progress I must say!
4/2/21
May You Never - John Martyn
3/4/21
Fire and Rain - James Taylor