Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Songwriting drought over

I finally broke my songwriting drought with “contradiction blues.” It may not be my best song, but I finally got something on paper.

The approach I used for the lyrics came from the last songwriters group. The idea was to write a song with just good lines, as opposed to telling a story. So that’s what I tried. I kept expecting some great message to emerge, however, it seems to hold together pretty well without that grand message.

While recording this, I found that it sounded really cool with my voice an octave lower (deeper voice). However, I haven’t trained my voice in this range and can’t hit all the notes, yet. My challenge over the next month or so is to be able to sing this in that lower range.

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Friday, May 05, 2006

Starting vocal lessons again

Recognizing that singing is my weak spot, I started taking voice lessons again. My goal is to make my voice as comfortable an instrument as my guitar.

In the first lesson, I became aware of habits I had developed that reduced the quality of my voice. Examples included tilting my head back which constricts my vocal chords. I've also concentrated too hard at trying to match pitch rather than letting my ears do the work. I found that by just singing, I was actually pretty close to being on pitch. I recognized that since I've been reluctant to sing, I've been trying to hard. This in turn has actually made my singing worse.

I did notice how far I have advanced in the past three years, when I wouldn't even sing for my dog. However, I still have a long way to go.

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