elle.to. the.bee

One track off this year’s last-minute homemade Holiday album — “Think of Me” from my favorite musical, Phantom of the Opera.  Dedicated to musical lover Ms. Kelly Bailey on her birthday! ;-)

Excuse the shoddy Garageband (lack of) skills.  This was made this afternoon.

If I could call one song perfection, it’s this one.  The whole album is flawless, of course, but this song is exactly what I want my music to sound like.

Scratch that, let me take over this woman’s life!  (pretty please?)

Listening on repeat ALL NIGHT.  Chills.

“Set Fire to the Rain” — Adele

A teaser for the song I’m currently covering — “All is Full of Love.” 

Conclusion: Bjork is really f%$*ing hard to sing.

I do love this song though and will try to do it justice (eventually).  It’ll probably have to take place somewhere besides my apartment late-ish at night.  The rest of the song gets pretty intense/belty.  Fun fun!

I have all kinds of problems with this first attempt but won’t point them out and will pretend like no one else can hear them. 

It needs much more work and mixing and such, but I had fun with it.  I hope the neighbors (at 10pm) did too!!

Me singing one of my favorite folk songs, “Shenandoah.”  I’m pretty out of practice, but hey.

I got the bright idea to put together a few songs for my family for Christmas… a few days beforehand, of course.  Other songs recorded include: “O Holy Night”, “Amazing Grace” and “How Can I Keep From Singing?” 

Stage one is complete (on this song at least).  I may try to layer my verses in rounds and such — if I have time.  In any case, I wanted to get something out there since I promised myself (and others) I would.

You know what I miss?  The crazy phenomena that happens when you’re fully in tune with someone else.  Not romantically or sexually speaking (although that’s fun too), but purely in a musical sense.  I’m fairly certain this only relates to singers, but I could be wrong.  Not about the in tune part, of course — but the phenomena I’m going to attempt to describe when two singers are perfectly in tune. 

I’d never experienced it fully until senior year of college when I performed “Le Duet Des Fleurs” from Lakme (a clip of it in this post) during the music school’s Opera Scenes.  Auditioning wasn’t my idea — my vocal coach tricked me into it — but I’m glad for it now.  I was to sing the lower part in the duet, which was more difficult than anticipated as I’ve nearly always been a very high soprano, but the part was more interesting (and prettier) in hindsight.

Anyway, when my duet partner and I finally got the music/lyrics down we were polishing in a tiny practice room before a dress rehearsal and the freakiest thing happened: a WHOOSHING sound came over me in waves (it sounded kind of like repeating the word “wow” in rapid succession but with an added movie studio-like quality, if that makes sense) and I thought I was losing my mind.  We both stopped — it turned out my partner had heard it too!  She wasn’t freaked out, though. She was pleased.  I was then informed that this was something that occurred only when two singers were fully in tune, that the sound waves (especially in an enclosed space) were interacting in such a way that only we two would be able to hear this reverb effect. 

Clearly a case of music major vs. the girl on scholarship who loves to sing but not enough to subject herself to upper-level musical theory and the like.

Cool right?  It was, except for the fact that I literally could not hear myself singing whenever it occurred.  Of course I wanted us to be fully in tune during the performance, but secretly I hoped we wouldn’t be that in tune so that I wouldn’t have some kind of panic attack on stage.  This sound was definitely that weird.

We did end up experiencing it on stage, at certain parts in the song where our parts were closest in pitch, especially at the end when we both sang the final melody on the same “ah” vowel.  No trace of any weird wow-whooshing sound on the recording, of course…

That’s my rambling way of saying that the physics of sound are pretty damn cool. 

Oh, and forgive any weirdness in the track — I’m not too experienced chopping it up in Garageband.