Leaky Bloggers

Out in the Cold

It will come as no surprise to you that I love singing. I love it. I sing all day, every day. When I am on my way home listening to my iPod, I am singing along in my head, and as soon as I stick my key in the front door lock the singing travels from my head to my mouth. Thank goodness I have nice neighbours (“No, it’s great, I can’t even sing in the shower, but I have you singing in my shower!”).

While singing by yourself is one thing, singing with other people is a whole different level of fun altogether. And I always found it quite hard to get my fix with that. Ok, so I am often making filks together with Aislinn and futureweasley, and we harmonise our little socks off, and it is awesome… but in the end it’s each of us alone recording our separate parts from different sides of the world. It’s not quite the same as signing together.

So I joined a singing course. This is the course description from the brochure:

Find out how your voice works. Learn to develop and control your breathing, understand the connection between your body and your voice, practise microphone technique, explore harmonising and learn how to use your resonating areas. We will practise full group, small group and solo singing in a range of styles.

How perfect is that! I never had any singing training, not really, and in this course you get to learn to use your voice better and harmonise! The teacher, David, is also really good, he’s had 20 years of experience and some of his ex-students have had number 1 hits in the UK (or so the brochure claims). But the absolute best thing about the course is that at the end of the lesson there is a 30 minute choir practice, together with the next group. Choir practice! Twenty-five people (all girls this time, but that’s not the case for each term), all singing together. In harmony! Oh man.

Right from the first lesson we launched into 5-tier harmonies. We did a funky Dusty Springfield song (I Only Wanna Be with You) and it sounded amazing! A bit hesitant still, but it was only the first class and people just needed to get more confidence. Right? In a few weeks everyone would be singing at full force and it would all just come together soooo nicely. And we were going to have a performance at the end of term, too. The limelight was finally beckoning me again!

Of course, I got hyperexcited (as I do) and started to imagine the choir doing my a-capella version of Out in the Cold (though the original one, not the filk version). I pulled David aside after class and asked him if he’d be interested in doing my arrangement (“it’s already arranged for 5 female parts,” I lied – the filk is more like 96 parts…) and he said he’d be very interested indeed. So I ran off home and set to work on rearranging Out in the Cold for 5 parts, and I threw in a brand new vocal arrangement for Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree by Brenda Lee for good measure. I suspected Out in the Cold might be a little bit advanced, but the Christmas one was a lot simpler and would be perfect for the show at the end of this term!

It took me a few weeks to finish the arrangements, record them so David could actually hear them before trying them, and then write them down on music paper (wow, that was a challenge. Being able to read doesn’t necessarily mean you can write too!). During this time I kept going to class, and after a few weeks it slowly began to dawn on me that I might have gotten a bit too carried away again. There wasn’t the massive leap in people’s singing confidence like I had expected. You know, driving lessons are for people who actually physically can’t drive, but somehow I always thought singing lessons were for people who already could sing, and liked doing it, and who just wanted to get better and learn better technique. This did not turn out to be the case for everyone in the group. Some people even claimed they had never sung – at least not since school. They never sang in the shower, they never even sang along with the radio in the car. And they had definitely never harmonised. (And, would you believe it, harmonising does not actually come naturally to everyone! I have to admit this came as a bit of a surprise to me!) Now I think it is great that people are plucking up the confidence to start singing together. All power to them! And they have chosen the best way and probably one of the most fun ways of going about it with this course. But this group, unfortunately, was not ready for my intricate harmonies.

I did finish writing up my arrangements and recording them, and I did show them to David, but by the time I did I already knew it was not going to happen. David agreed. He thought my arrangements were “sophisticated” and “really interesting” – but not for this group. Not even my “simple” Brenda Lee one.

Oh well. One day I will hear people sing my arrangements, I am determined. I actually almost like the arranging and directing more than the singing itself. It’s gonna happen. And I am beginning to get some ideas for how I am going to make this happen… But that’s for a next blog.

I’m sticking with the course, though! It’s still great fun, and I am definitely learning a lot, and some other really fun stuff has come out of it too… but that, too, is for a next blog!

PS: Have you voted for the filkies yet? Only a few days left to go!