AuthorI'm a high school English teacher who hasn't quite given up his dream of being a rock star. Archives
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Week 2: Warming Up My Voice3/9/2022 The principal goal of this Genius Hour project is to take the songs that I have been working on sporadically for the past fourteen years and try to finish them. So why has it taken so long for me to actually get songs to the finish line? Simply enough, it's the vocals. Despite being an English teacher and reading quite a bit, I've never spent a lot of time writing lyrics for songs. And even if I did, it really has never mattered much to me because I always knew I couldn't sing anyway, so why bother? Well, with this project, the idea is to change that narrative and actually give myself the means to write interesting vocal parts. I can't guarantee I'll be able to sing everything I write, but if I can at least start the process of improving my singing voice, that should theoretically make it easier to communicate my ideas to someone who is more skilled than me. Pictured: Someone who actually knows what they're doing. This Week's Progress: VocalsEarlier in the week, I went online and researched places to take voice lessons in the area. I stumbled upon Triad Music Academy, which offers bundles of four lessons at a time for $160. That's not the worst deal I've heard considering the benefits of having one-on-one time with a teacher who can cater instruction directly to you, but I'm also not sure that this would be money well spent just yet. In the meantime, I've turned my attention to more of the high quality free resources I've been able to find on YouTube, which has led me to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, which is an amazing repository of voice lessons. So far, I have only gone through his video called "Learn How to Sing For Guys" (embedded below), but it has given me some really good information on improving my posture, breath control, and finding ways to hit notes within a specific key. He has some other videos on subjects like daily vocal exercises and how to properly warm up your voice that I am planning on consulting this week. This Week's Progress: SongwritingCompared to the first week of the project, I haven't had as much progress regarding new songwriting, but since last week's post focused on the background for the project, I am going to take some time now to talk about what I did both before the project and in the first week to help streamline my creative process during these twelve weeks. Before the project started, I went through all the song files on my computer and listened to every one. Some of these were pieces of recorded riffs, and others were more written out pieces of music I've accumulated for years. Each piece of music was rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with a 5 being a piece of music that I considered either to have a lot of potential or one that gave me a raw smiling or headbanging kind of reaction. During the first week of the project, I took one of these pieces that was the closest to being a real song and forced myself to sit down and write some lyrics for it and record its guitar solo. Before the project started, all I had in mind for this song was a rough rhythm for the vocal melody and a working title: "Dying Light." Building off that idea of light dying, I later came up with the lyric "Love born in fire / burns to ashes before my eyes." I still don't know if that lyric is any good or if it is incredibly generic, but building off that idea, I took some advice from my songwriting course and created a word cloud and wrote down as many words I could associate with "fire," "death," and "light." At this point, lyrics for the first verse do exist and I have recorded a rough take of me "singing" those parts to get the overall feel, but hopefully nobody ends up hearing the part that has been sung so far because while it's not terrible for a guide vocal, it is very much not what the final product is supposed to be. With that being said, one area I've been learning to focus on with this project is the idea that all art is substandard at some point in the creative process. There will be many bad parts and cliché lyrics before I can whip my musical ideas into shape, but I have to be okay with that part of the process. Some DataLyrics Written
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