I Suck at Singstar

I'm not a great singer. I'm not even a good singer. My voice isn't BAD, but I really need to concentrate to stay in tune, and I don't feel natural doing it. When I do concentrate and practice plenty, I can record a reasonable vocal for a song. Today I had a shot at the playstation game Singstar. In a nutshell, you sing into a microphone along with a well-known song and the game works out how well you stayed in tune and rhythm. Not very well at all, in my case.

The only song I did reasonably well in was 'Every Breath You Take', which I suspect was because I know it fairly well and it is reasonably close to my own limited vocal range. Less successful was 'Tutti Frutti', and I totally crashed and burned on 'Video Killed The Radio Star', but I was trying to sing the female part, two octaves lower than normal, so not entirely surprising.

I found I did better by ignoring the on-sceen guide, apart from the lyrics, as the notes shown are in proportion to the line being sung, so can be two words or a whole sentence; 1 bar or 4. One of those things that is probably easier to follow if you can't read music. What is interesting, though disappointing for me, is the read-out shows how far out from the notes you are singing. I found that I was wobbling around notes much more than I realised, though once I saw that I was able to address it.

I hope to have another shot soon - I think it could actually be a reasonable tool for improving pitch awareness, and helping my own singing skills (or apparent lack of them).

Theremin Update #1

I thought I'd put a little bit of blurb up here about my progress with the theremin. After a couple of months with no progress, mainly due to not being able to find somewhere suitable for it to live, I've now got into a good routine of having a practice at least once a day. So far I'm now getting the hang of aerial fingering, so I'm able to do some short runs without wobbling all over the place, and getting a feel for some common intervals. I can pull off an ascending scale, but descending is a bit more tricky for some reason. And finally, I'm able to play some basic and actually recognisable tunes.

I've done all this just by ear so far, with my acoustic guitar close at hand for occasional assistance, so my next step is going to be to get a sound source to try and play along with some pre-recorded music. Trying to keep in tune with another instrument could well prove to be more tricky than keeping in tune with myself. We shall see (hear). Hopefully, in another couple of weeks I should be ready to put some theremin parts down onto some tracks I have set aside, albeit pretty basic ones. That'll be the acid test.

My previous post about the clarinet has just been included on MusicThing - I'm quite honoured. Thanks Tom!

Bass Cobwebs

For the first time in ages I've got together with a bunch of guys to play music. I'm buzzing!
We played for a couple of hours - mostly just jamming around ideas, a guitar riff here, a bass-line there. Covered a pretty good range of stuff within a general hard rock area - some fast and funky and some slower and laid-back.

I'm definitely the weakest link - the others played much faster and more fluently than I did. It's been a while since I last played much bass and it showed, though I did manage to keep up most of the time by keeping it simpler than I would usually. I'll need to do a bit of ear-training too - there were a couple of places where I got lost and took a while to work out what I should have been playing.

So, the cobwebs have been dusted off (the bass, at least) - now I need to get down to seriously polishing up on technique...