As you possibly know, I've been out of action with the flu and a nasty throat infection for the last two weeks, (hence my frequent blogging). Now, obviously this has been a downer on my music-making abilities, and I've been falling behind with my request list of covers. However, I've found that it has almost also been quite useful.
Instead of just lazing around for the full two weeks, I put my time to use and I listened to some of my roughs, my covers, and of course Your Only One. Not to say that I didn't laze around, I did *cough* watch all of season 6 and 7 of NCIS, but I listened back on these old things and I wrote feedback on each one. First, I wrote things that I liked about my songs, as my violin teacher always taught me to look first at the positive things because every performance, even if sung by somebody who has the voice of a strangled cat, has to have one positive thing about it. Then, I wrote everything I didn't like about it and everything I want to work on for live performances and recordings. For example, I hate my pronunciation of the word 'my'.
It may seem stupid, but little things like that often get forgotten and can make all the difference. I've realized that there is a lot I want to work on both vocally and instrumentally, and I know that if I focus on those specific areas, my recording and performance will become much better.
After I'd finished my self evaluation, which I kid you not, took me HOURS, I asked my brother to do an evaluation. Now, obviously I wasn't going to ask him to do it in the same depth, but I just asked him to pick out one thing that he liked and one thing that he didn't about each song, to see if we had chosen the same areas or if he spotted something entirely different. Of course, people have different musical tastes and biases and levels of training - I mean, my brother is classically trained like myself but loves electronic game music. This will only broaden your understanding of how people interpret you as an artist though, and while you might not necessarily agree with what they say, it won't harm you to know. I highly recommend doing this as it can certainly produced a much more polished, professional sound.
As a bonus, I'll tell you since I got my voice back, I did record this. You can hear an example of my strange 'my'.
Music, fashion and rants about the peculiarities in the life of a musician.
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