A few months back I pounded aimlessly on my keyboard about how to sing the intervals between notes to assist in sight reading: and prior to that a piece about a song that was really helpful in understanding those intervals. I assume that you’ve read and memorized them and gotten a tattoo of the really good […]
So we get this big pile of music in a few weeks and then Susie starts teaching us how they’re supposed to (going to) sound and she waves her arms and makes funny faces and eventually it all comes together. But what happened before that? What did our fearless leader do? Having done this kind […]
I’ve been singing in some sort of organized, conducted choral music since I was in the 6th grade so it’s not often that I run into something applicable to choral singing that I’ve never heard of before. Today I did and 1) it makes sense, 2) it tracks with similar stuff in life that also […]
I haven’t had the occasion to do much (okay…any) singing this summer. Way too many events, visitors and home improvement projects have chewed up my days like locusts through a wheat field. At least the TV hasn’t take up much of my time. No summer sports I care about and the steaming pile of reality […]
This has exactly nada to do with singing but is my version of celebrating being alive. Until I found this on YouTube I didn’t even know the technology existed to make this kind of video but I love how they used it! The result is a complete sphere of view, just click and drag in […]
Warning: soapbox standing to follow. I bet I’m not the only person whose most influential teacher was a conductor. Thanks to the small community I grew up in, I had the same choir director from 6th grade all the way through the end of high school and she had a profound effect on my life. […]
One of the things about my mother that really struck a chord with her then-teenage son was her role in the University of Vermont’s Interdisciplinary Studies program, specifically that arm of it that dealt with the care and treatment of children who were radically developmentally disabled and saw little for their future beyond constant care. […]
About singing but not in a choir, yet in one…kinda. Just a neat story I wanted to share… In 1995 I designed a computer-based forecasting system for a disc drive manufacturer that linked together sales and marketing offices in 31 countries around the world and then was tasked with training all of the users (it’s your […]
So here’s something cool that a very short list of people on the planet know. It’s not a secret, it’s a nobody-in-their-right-mind-would-see-this sorta thing. When the USS California (CGN-36) was in dry dock getting a face lift following an Indian Ocean cruise* there was an afternoon set aside to clean the reactor rooms. Yeah, the […]
A friend sent me this and I had to share it. After the singer speaks, hit pause and wrap your head around what she just said. How do you know you’re singing a correct pitch if you can’t hear it? You sing it over and over into a receiver that works much like a guitar […]