Better

 

I'm better.*  I'm still not planning on conquering the world this week but maybe next.**  I would be better better if I hadn't had the standard nonsense of my energy starting to flow back in yesterday evening with the result that I COULD NOT GET TO SLEEP LAST NIGHT.***  So today has been a struggle.  A different kind of struggle, but there's still been a certain amount of Antaeusian wrestling about it, and holding a giant over your head gets really tiring. 

            Also my brain is lying on the bottom of my skull like a soufflé hit with a shovel.  Have I mentioned that both Niall and Penelope have degrees in hard science?  Niall thinks he's going to teach me the rudiments—repeat:  rudiments—of calculus† and Penelope has loaned me a couple of basic physics texts that she used when she was a classroom teacher.  I took the easier†† of these two alarming-looking textbooks to the sofa with me this afternoon with the very basic text that I bought about a week ago because I know from experience that one explanation isn't going to shatter my ignorance, and . . . whimper. 

            Meanwhile, there was Oisin. 

jessgoesnorth

I wonder if the quality of the recording was part of the problem. Lots of recorders compress the sound in a way that cuts out all the nice resonance which you're working to get into your voice. . . .  Built in microphones are generally pretty poor as well – various singing fora recommend proper recording equipment that costs a fortune but a separate microphone you can connect to a computer might be a good stand-in if you want to record yourself more often with less wincing! (I'd always go for recording the sound alone rather than sound and video… less to wince about!)

I don't know how to turn off Pooka and Astarte's video—I don't know how to record sound only and as you say it's not going to solve the built-in microphone problem.  I did know that I wasn't going to be getting a great result but no, it didn't occur to me that it might be quite this destructive—I mean that what I'm hearing when I play back is that much, ahem, less accurate than the original noise I was making.  But this is almost exactly what Oisin said to me today:  record on an iPhone?  Am I crazy?  But it's worse than that—because he does have professional recording equipment and in fact has a little handheld gizmo that he says has fabulous sound and (he added heartily) that we'll use that.  Gleep.  You're all systematically destroying my wiggle room, you know?  I was deliberately recording myself when I wasn't at my best, and I also knew that Pooka and Astarte as jills-of-all-trades were not going to be fabulous recorders, even if I didn't know how unfabulous.  Ah well, there will still be the wiggle room of the fact that I get feverishly anxious about singing for Oisin.  Which probably explains why I keep forgetting to photocopy my music.††  So I can only sing stuff that he can bear having me shrieking past his ear, and then I usually can't read the lyrics well enough anyway and am busy panicking, so sing most of it on 'ah'. 

But for example the accompaniment to She's Like a Swallow is really pretty (as we discovered today).  It's one of these frellers where the accompaniment is having its own party and mere singers are not invited, however, but it would be worth persevering.  Hmm.  This may the moment to experiment with the CD in the back of the book.

Have you thought about recording your lessons? Not only does it capture the good bits, but I used to find it very helpful to sing along to recorded warm-ups from lessons to try and recapture a bit of that singing teacher studio magic!

. . . And the bad bits.  But yes.  Nadia also mentioned a long time ago now that some people do record their lessons.  That went straight past me like a bullet, with me cringing frantically out of the way.  But it's occurred to me again lately.  Because it is so frustrating that I'm now at the stage where I'm more relaxed at home—I have not merely a G and an A at home, but more often than not a B-below-high-C—and Nadia never bothers luring me above G, and sometimes stops at F.  I can hear myself shutting down.  I can't get the (comparatively) lovely round notes out of myself that she can—but I can yowl up to G and usually A without thinking about it.  So I have been wondering if it might be worth trying to record a lesson.  On whatever Styrofoam and chewing gum tech I'd be using I'm not going to get the round notes, but I would get what Nadia says to me. 

PamAdams

I do weight-training. Pushing through a too-heavy lift, even though I need a spotter to assist, will improve my strength tomorrow.

If it doesn't break you.  However I do have enough sense not to be trying to sing Una Voce Poco Fa.  Yet.

I've been working on my own for the last year. . . . However, I'm definitely noticing a tendency to coast, so am signing up for more training.

Yes.  This is one of those the world-is-divided-into-two-categories things.  There are the people who understand about taking lessons/going to practise sessions even when neither your job, your relationship(s) nor your mental health demands it and you're never going to be professional/the best/even sort of moderately good at it, and the people who don't get this at all.  I am absolutely in the former category.  Generally speaking anything I want to spend time doing on a regular basis I want to do better.  It's just . . . more interesting, trying to do something better.  I do have the excuse of writing stories for a living—the more different things you can crawl inside of, the more stuff you have to draw on when the Story Council sends you something impossible.†††  But my personal experience of first-class music is absolutely enhanced by my ridiculous struggles with piano and voice—and my possibly even more absurd forays into composing mean that I look at scores with a whole extra dimension of curiosity and engagement.  Oisin was playing Durufle and Reger on the organ today and I was hanging over his shoulder and thinking, how do they do that?  —Aside from being brilliant, that is. 

Bratsche

When I ask my students to record themselves, I ALWAYS tell them they need to discount at least half of what they hear as the fault of their recording equipment. (Unless, of course, they have professional level recording equipment on hand, which none of mine have ever had.) We're very used to hearing other people performing who have been recorded with pretty good equipment in decent acoustic spaces.

I entirely forgot about the decent acoustic spaces part.  I don't suppose the boiling water and the clash of pans were doing me any favours the other night.  Sigh.  But there is a fabulous little handheld doohickey in my future. . . .

And I do have a doodle of gigantic throbbing neon ratbags, as requested by Blogmom on the forum last night.  You will be thrilled to know.  But this is long enough and you'll just have to wait.

            Mwa hahahahahahaha. 

* * *

* jkribbitdesigns

. . . thank you for sharing your coping skills and thank everyone on the forum for sharing their experiences. I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia 15 years ago . . . I'm in the midst of a huge flare. . .  It's very discouraging. Reading the last couple of posts from Robin and all the comments on the forum, I don't feel as alone in this. . . .

I find it pretty discouraging that so many of us still feel so isolated.  Some of it is the nature of the disease(s) themselves:  if you're tired and sore and stupid engaging with the world is hard:  you're too tired, you hurt too much, and your brain is porridge.  But some of it, I feel, is that there's still a bias that what's wrong with us isn't a real disease—and that we're only welcome in polite society if we pretend to be 'normal'—which we can only do on a good day, we can't predict when we're going to have a good day, and why should we have to anyway?  I know there are exceptions, but the people I know who get it usually get it because they have some direct experience of someone with one of these slippery conditions.

            Anyway.  I talk about my ME more than I planned to when I started this blog, for exactly this reason—that I hear from too many people saying it's a relief to hear more injured parties talking about it.

Diane in MN

Could an infection have sparked your ME flare? 

Almost certainly.  I think of it as my jealous boyfriend.  How dare I have a flirtation with a random virus?  I belong to it. 

** No, I haven't got time to conquer the world.  I have to finish a novel. 

*** Thanks for all the game recs.  The only ones I'd seen by the time I shut down the laptop last night were Maren's, so, while I was lying awake I investigated them on Astarte and for the venial reason that it was the cheapest I bought THE AWAKENING.  But you may remember my little broadband issues.  It took nearly an hour, give or take, to download the freller—I went back to my nice paper-tech book for a while and eventually gave up and turned the reading light off again . . . and lay there in the glinting twilight of Astarte's screen.  Yes, of course I could have put her in the next room^ but I was transported to an ancient era when you might fall asleep with the TV on^^ and wake up to darkness and an empty flickering blue screen.   How many of you remember when, not only was there no internet, the TV went off the air every night? 

^ Some kind of Rubicon is crossed when you start sleeping with your technology.  Astarte is on the bed.  Pooka is on the shelf beside, next to the kitchen timer I use for an alarm clock.  Pooka is of course (metaphorically) hardwired to Peter's emergency buzzer . . . and Astarte is also my ereader.  It's logical really.  

^^ I have never had a TV in the bedroom+ but there have been several eras in my life that have involved falling asleep on the sofa. 

+ Eww.  Sorry, but eww. 

†  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 

†† Which is to say the one with more photographs and fewer equations. 

††† Slightly in my defense, my copier lives at the cottage, and my piano and my music live at the mews. 

‡ Like right now.  I have a Definition of the Universe Through Your Friend, Physics waiting in my email inbox.  I need to read those basic physics books fast.  I should really learn not to ask experts.  They may answer.  They may then expect you to enter into a conversation with them on the subject they feel you brought up.  Gleep again.  Gleep cubed.