Tough week

From monday to today, I've been sick. Pretty sick. I was almost close to take two days in a row. I don't really know the exact cause of my sickness, but i used to get sick like this upon the change of the seasons, so i need to deal with it. Not to mention, i couldn't really practice because of my sickness. All i've been doing this week was lying flat on the bed and sleeping for hours and hours. I missed wise meeting and mentor meeting, and i feel like i'm really behind.

Anyways, during this phase, i've been watching this youtube video countless times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMBQXB1HPIQ
The video is about a guy singing a korean song called "running in the sky".
As the name of the song suggests, this is a really optimistic song, and also a love song that has a great
melody and lyrics. I also noticed he sings high notes really easily and smoothly, which still remains as a mystery for me... I was really impressed by him playing guitar and singin the song. He is one of many role models i want to be.

Research - How is sound produced

http://edu.kbyyed.go.kr/newboard/BList.asp?Flag=View&TId=yy_edu3&Page=1&BNo=3&sWord=&ss=0&sc=0&sn=0&BRef=3

Here is one interesting video that covers how the sound is produced. It is kinda ironical that a lot of people are unaware of how their voice is produced, when they talk everyday (and this includes me also).
After watching this video and wandering many different websites, I finally realized how the voice is made inside our neck.

Okay, so here is a nice digram of our vocal chord. I don't know all these vocabularies that are in the diagram, but at this point, those retain no importance. All I needed to focus on was two thick lines that are surrounding Trachea, in the middle of the picture. Those are called vocal fold and they have the most important role in making voices. When you are just staying still, not saying anything, the vocal folds are closed, and stuck together. But when you say something, the vocal folds open up and vibrate to make different pitches of sounds. This is how the voice is created. However, it is a little bit different when you are trying to sing. In order to sing, the first thing you do is inhale deeply. The air passes through vocal chords and when you make sounds you exhale the air you just breathed in with a pressure. During that process, vocal folds open up and then you are singing.

But in the video, i found something very interesting. There were multiple demos that a guy went through and in one of them, there was a woman singing relatively high notes. While she was singing, the vocal folds became closer and ended up touching each other. At that instance, she cracked her voice and made an unplesant sound. I thought that's what i was going through every day. I knew that i needed to breath more and deeper but I didn't know why i needed to do that. But the video showed me that i should, in order to keep the vocal folds moving so that it doesn't close.

Well, it turned out that researching is actually quite helpful. I'm discovering so many things that i didn't know before about singing, and the fact is that i still don't know about 99% of the information there is... which might be a good thing, and a 'bad' thing (too much work!)

Singing Lesson #2

2PM, every other Saturday. This is one of the most important
times in this project, because I have a vocal lesson at this time. Although I should’ve
wakened up 5 hours before I’m supposed to sing, I woke up and 1 because of my
laziness and undisciplined life… and managed to get on a TCAT bus (barely). We
start off our lesson by doing some vocal exercises, where I focus on getting
the best sound possible. She kept telling me to release the sound out of my
mouth so that it could go straight, and far away. Yes, this sounds quite easy,
but it’s really tricky because one tiny mistake messes up everything and causes
me to produce ‘bad’ sounds.  My teacher
told me that singing is all about thinking, so I should look up the sky and
implies myself that I’m singing all the way to that piece of cloud I see. And surprisingly,
when I try this way, I seemed to get better sounds, which is really
interesting.

The lesson was similar to the first one. I sang the first
part of the song along with the melody of piano. But I still had problems
during the part where it has most of the high notes. I knew that the answer to that
part lies in controlling breathing. But while I’m singing, I tend to use up the
breath before I get there and end up making a cacophonous sound. In order to
solve this problem, I need to sing a lot so that I could be enlightened. In
here, ‘enlightenment’ means that after I practice many times, there will be one
time that I could manage the high notes that I couldn’t have otherwise. It
means the feeling I had during that process. Besides singing lots of times, my
teacher made me to do some vocal practice regularly. That is, I sing ‘Ah’ along
a simple progression, such as CDEFG. After that, I go up one note and sing
DEFGA and so on, until I hit 2^nd octave A. This is something that I
really haven’t tried at my house so far, and I hope I could do this steadily to
get good results.

Recordings

Yay it was snowday! I guess it was kinda random to have a snowday when we had about two inches of snow, becuase its Ithaca. Anyways, I tried to take advantage of the snowday, and luckily i had no work this week because Cornell was on sping break. Two events that were supposed to happen today gave me tons of free time to spend for myself. I decided to sing but this time, with recording those. Since i have all my equipments ready and even the software, there was nothing to worry about. I recorded about two hours, which was quite fun, even though it turned out to be not very good. Recordings were really valuable for me becuase it was able to provide me with some great feedbacks. i can't really 'listen' while i'm singing, in here, 'listen' means hearing pitches, breathing and the sound, but my mic can and it did.
The sound i hear when im singing and the sound i hear from my laptop was really really different. It was able to catch every kind of detail that was recorded and there were lots of things i needed to learn from it.
Here are some feedbacks i got from my recordings.

•  I'm still not breathing the way i'm supposed to. And because of that, i make lots of mistakes when singing high notes and the sound is very unstable.
•  I tend to cut the voice at the end of the verse, which i am supposed to take it further way. I think it was because i kinda stop breathing once the verse is over.
•  Some more enunciation is needed. Words i say are not really clear to understand. I mean, i know what the words are, but those are not as clear as the artitsts sing.

Plans

In the class today, I heard that the 3rd marking period is going to be over in two weeks. I just got my report cards back, and all the sudden I heard that news. According to somebody else, this marking period is only 8 weeks long, because we had two weeks of breaks this quarter. 

From today, there are only about 10 weeks until the doomsday. So I decided to set up a plan to keep myself organized and act according to it. The things I need to accomplish are as follows: Master singing, record guitar (rhythm and solo), Piano (which I'm not really sure about because there is a chance that piano wouldn't really fit into the song) and Drums (probably FL studio). And I'll write plants by weeks

1) Singing practice along with guitar practice. Look up better ways to play the chords (barre chords)

2) Keep singing. At this point, guitar track should be done, which also includes solo. Record it if possible

3) Keep singing and try to memorize all the verses

4) Keep singing. At this point, the singing better be done perfectly.

5) Start recording, but don't aim to make everything perfect, since I wouldn't be able to get the perfect one without any practice. This should be like practice sessions.

6) Keep recording, should be done.

7) Start FL studio, along with learning how to mix to make the song sound better

8) Should be done making loops and begin editing the song.

9) If everything is perfect by this time, record a video of me performing, probably four videos for each part.

10) Presentation and WISE is done.

So this was a general plan I came up with. I'm pretty sure that everything can't exactly work out as I planned, but if I work by butt off, I think I can manage this schedule. As I said earlier, this is not something I'm doing for grades. This is what I chose to be a better singer and a better person who can enjoy music. I want to finish this project without any regrets and this will require great dedication and discipline.

High Notes

 I personally think the ability to sing high notes is a prerequisite for all the good singers. There are some people who are innately born with this skill, which is really rare, and no, I'm not one of those lucky people. However, people say if one practices really hard, they will eventually understand and will be able to hit the high notes. Even though time required to do so will vary by person by person, it is still relieving that there is still a room for improvement.

I feel like after practicing for a few weeks, I think i have improved quite a bit. In the beginning, i remember i had difficulty singing up to second octave F, or F sharp. However, one interesting thing is that during last years summer, when i was practicing singing by my own, i was able to barely sing up to second ocatve A, but then I completely forgot about singing, since I was working on my college apps ardously.

Anyways, after practicing breathing techniques for awhile, i was able to gain more stability and better sound. Over the weekend, I tried singing the first part of I'm yours. Unlike my thought, it went really well. I was able to hit the highest note relatively easily, comparing to last few attempts. During that, I feel like I sort of realized how to sing higher notes. These are a few tips.

• Squeeze abs as if i'm pooping... or i could throw my arms in the air, which will increase the capacity of my body, and this lets me to hit higher notes
• Look up, about 15 degrees and imply myselft that I can sing it. I think mind control is a really important part of singingg, because when I think i can do it, there were higher chances that i was actually able to do it.
• Open the mouth wide so that the sound could go outside the mouth easily.

Mentor Meting

Ugh, I really need to stop procrastinating. My mentor
meeting was on Monday, 4^th period, but now it’s Wednesday night and
I’m writing about the meeting that happened two days ago. Well, I had to work
from 6 to 10 on Tuesday and Wednesday. I also had two tests today, AP Calc and
APES which made my schedule completely chaotic.

Anyways, Mr.Lesser and I talked about my recent progress. I
said that I was able to hit higher note, which is 2^nd octave G
sharp, the highest note in “I’m yours”. But the thing is that I can only hit
the note barely, so that I could produce the sound itself. It’s not delight at
all, not even smooth. But we considered that important because in the first
mentor meeting, I told Mr.Lesser that I am little bit worried because I couldn’t
sing up that high. However, we both were relieved because at least I made a
tiny progress.

We also talked about drum part of the song. My original goal
was to play the drum, but then I changed it to making a loop. However, after
using Fruity Loops, I realized how hard it is to make a simplest 4 bit loop. I
might learn it over the book, or from Mr.Lesser because he said he has used it
quite a long time ago. He also suggested that I could use Korean traditional
drum. We both thought it was a clever idea because in the actual song, the guy
uses Bongo, which sounds pretty similar to Korean drum.

Lastly, we talked about the journal entries I write in my
blog and about the recent feedback I got from Ms.Gergely. Instead of writing every
single post like a ‘Diary of a cat’, I decided to write it more meaningfully.
Mr.Lesser gave me advices to write it in more detail, and to put in my thoughts
in every entry.

Unlike my thought, mentor meeting was really enjoyable and freshening.
I was able to check where I am in terms of work and journal stuff, and was able
to get great feedbacks and some innovative advices.

Research - singing mechanism

First of all, there are just so many different schools of thoughts on this issue and I guess I'm learning from what I find on the website, so this consists of mixture of theories. When I was thinking about this project, I desperately needed to know how to sing. I just didn’t have basic understandings of how singing works out in our body and how the good sounds are produced. In order to get clues, I surfed through lots of forums and blogs that deal with these topics. Many of them were in Korean websites, just because I think theories that are written in Korean is much better to understand and read. With researching for many hours, I learned that the most basic thing when singing is breathing. Before I knew about this, I thought all the people were singing with just their voice, and from my experience, my throat always used to hurt after hours of singing in a karaoke place. It seemed like that all the professional singers had innately better throats that theirs never hurt even though they sing all day, every day.

But after I learned about breathing, my throat never hurt like before, even I sang for a good few hours, with this type of breathing, which is called abdominal breathing.

.

The mechanism goes like this. Right before you sing a verse, or pretty much anything, you breathe in with your mouth. Some forums say you should also breathe with your nose simultaneously just to get as much air as possible. Upon breathing, the lower part of your stomach should pop out and should hold on to it. When you sing, you gently release your breath but not all the way, because that way, you are going to end up making some weird noise. And when all the breath has gone out, you breathe again during the ‘gaps’ of the songs. For example, in a song called Viva La Vida, you would breath during a $ mark.

$ I used to rule the world $ Seas would rise when I gave the word $ Now in the morning I sleep alone $ Sweep the streets I used to own.

This is how you should breathe when you are singing. But there are sometimes that you just don’t have enough time to breathe enough air for the verse, and end up making a mistake. I encounter this type of situation and I am still looking for a solution. My guess is that I should increase my lung capacity so that I could breathe more air in a shorter time.

There are some exercises to help breathing process. I wouldn’t mention about swimming and running or all the other aerobic exercises because I think even Chimpanzees would know that will help for sure. The teacher who teaches me vocal lessons told me a simple exercise that everybody could do easily. Lie comfortably on a floor and put about 3pounds of weight on your stomach (Dictionary is really good if you don’t have any alternatives). Breathe as much air as possible and hold on to it about ten seconds. Once you count up to then, try to breathe out as long as possible with your mouth open slightly. During this process, you only open a tiny gap between up and bottom teeth. If you feel like you are dying, you stop and repeat the same process about ten times. I am doing this with different exercises and this really helps because this gives you more stability when singing and of course, larger lung capacity. Next time, I am going to write about different types of mechanisms of singing.

Bloggin` and recent progress

After waking up at 11, and coming to school late, I encountered Ms.Gergely on the hallway. We had a brief conversation about my blog and she said my blog kind of looks like a diary of a cat, which was the example of ‘the way we should avoid when writing our journal entries.’ With the feedback, I thought for a while and realized that I actually didn’t really care much when writing blog posts. It was all about what I did every day (not even everyday) and what I will do in the future, which I didn’t really put much effort in. Ms. Gergely said it is okay so far that I wrote entries like that since it’s been not that long. But she said I need to write better entries, guided by the diagram that was also in the packet. So now, I have that packet right in front of me and trying to write a journal entry according to the diagram.

Anyways, this week was really crazy and still is because I have to perform at the Cabaret night on Friday and Saturday, since I’m a part of the Korean Drumming club. And along with that, I work three days a week (Tues, Weds, Thurs) which left me no room to practice and do homework. I did a little bit of singing over the weekend, but I think I need to try harder. Still, I am trying to figure out how to control my breath and just sing better in general. I think the answer lies in breathing, which the singing is all about. I think it’s the matter of holding breath longer and increasing the capacity of my lungs and stomach. To solve this problem, I am swimming about hour every other morning and working out (which doesn’t really help, but it’s better than not doing anything).

At the same time I’m working on I’m yours, I am also trying to sing a few different songs, which include Viva La Vida by Coldplay. The song is exceptionally good, in a sense that it goes as high as I’m yours goes and shares the similar chords. And I have personal preference for the song also. After singing that song sometimes, I realized that I could basically sing up to the highest note in Viva La Vida. However, it was only possible when I had 100% of my breath. When I’m singing and trying to hit that note, I run out of my breath and screw it up. The antidote to this situation is increasing my lung capacity. Same problem occurs to me when I’m trying to sing other songs besides these. I simply can’t hold breath long enough and end up making weird noises which is really annoying because even though I know the answer to it, I can’t really solve the problem in a short period of time. And I guess this is why Wise is all about discipline and dedication, because only though hard and routinely work, I can get over an obstacle.

Research - what is singing?

What is singing? According to Wikipedia definition is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm. So its basically making sound that is pleasant to hear, that has candences and tones. All people have been singing from their young ages, not knowing what it actually is though. I think singing is more of a communication between a person to a person (or people). It's just a different way how people talk to each other since it has melody in it.

Lets just say that is a brief definition of singing. But I need to know how to sing better. You know, you just don't want to sing in monotonous voice. You want it to be as delightful and persuasive as possible. You need to blend your soul with your voice and articualte that to the audience.

Okay then i guess i know what to do. But what if you can't really sing that well? Not everyone is born with the innate ability. Actually only some are and i realized I'm not one of them, especially when it comes to hitting high notes. As of now, my limit is about 2 Octave G, A but i can barely sing it. And in order to sing a note you want to sing, you need to be able to sing a note that is 2notes higher than that. That way, you will be able to hit that note freely.

In order to hit higher notes, i looked around many different websites and learned how it works, (or it is supposed to) and different ways to sing and drills that will let me 'attain' the notes.

I will post these researches in different parts since there are just so much information about it and since further research is still required.

I'm Yours

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYhrYHmUPn0

Well, it is kinda funny that i forgot to upload a video that i'm trying to emulate.

This is a video of Jason Mraz performing I'm Yours at an asian country, which i'm not sure whether

it's Japan or Korea. But it is broadcasted through a Korean channel.

The chords and strokes are different from what I have on my sheet music,

but whatever. It's just a little bit of variation i can deal with.

Same thing, different days

There wasn't much of an update on my blog for past few days.

Yes, I've been kinda lazy, but at the same time, there isn't really many things to post.

I kinda want to upload the recordings, but at this point, it would be just embarassing

because everythings imperfect as of now.

This week, i've been just singing a bunch of songs (that i could sing) and if there were sings that i couldn't

really handle because of high notes, i just ignored it.

To deal with this, I am going to the y every morning since i have four frees in a row (1,2,3,4) to swim.

Swimming is extremely good for singing since it enlarges my lung capactiy, which will then improve

amount of air i can breathe in in a given time. More air means more stability and this will let me sing

higher notes. (I learned this from a little research on a bunch of websites). We'll see if it will actually work or

not.

1st Vocal Lesson

I just though vocal lesson is the salt and light of my wise project.

Its probably becasue my project also includes singing, the only part that i'm not prepared for

since i've never been a singer in my life. I thoguht singing would come naturally to me because

i have a relatively high voice pitch, and i used run, bike and swim frequently in my past years.

However, it wasn't like what i thought it would be. Singing is like learning a new kind of instrument.

There needs to be time and lots of practice to be a decent singer. (Well yeah, there are some people

that are born with an intrinsic talent, but i realized i'm not one of them.)

However, the vocal lesson is beginning to pave my way. I've had a few lessosn before and i'm continuing it

from the same teacher. Today, i learend how to control my breath, how to effectively handle high notes

and some other trivial stuff. And since i tend to forget lots of things right after i learend, i decided i should

have a tiny 'journal' to jot down what i learn on each day. I'm planning to have a few more lessons,

and we'll see how it will go, whether it could help me sing like princess Fiona.