Mic check 1,2,3

As I said yesterday, my mic was acting crazy and I got really scared about it becuase this is time to record and if i have a mic breakdown, i wouldn't be able to finish my project. So, i brought my mic over to Mr.Heurich and tested it with his comptuer. We plugged my mic in via pre-amp to his iMac and I didn't hear a bit of wind noise that was all over my computer yesterday.

So, with a great hope, I tried the same thing at my house with my computer and it was the same. A little bit frustrated, i started to play some time with settings and I was able to reduce the amount of noise somehow. But still I haven't figured out what's going on really. I am going to bring my computer to Mr.Herich ASAP and find out what's wrong with my system.

I also uploaded on a recording website. (http://homerecording.com/bbs/equipment-forums/microphones/my-mic-making-wind-noise-326554/). Haven't got any feedbacks yet, but I'll check it out soon and see what kind of solutions i could get.

I wish i could upload an mp3 file, but the website doesn't let me...

This weekend + Monday.

I still can't believe there are only 2 weeks left for my wise journey. It is important because it is a time that I should actually be compiling my effort and produce a solid work that demonstrates it. As this goes, I finally stepped up and began recording from this Sunday. Also, one of my friends volunteered to help me on this project by singing a chorus. She has done a similar thing and a lot of recordings, so she was really good at those. I was able to finish recording guitar part today, which took infinite number of trials, for a simple part that's going to be looped. If i knew this would take forever, i would've started earlier. That's my fault being lazy.

I must be done recording music parts by this week because on the following weekend, I'll have to record vocal part, which is the most difficult part of all. It's going to be a duet, which wasn't my plan, but after singing a few times, it turned out that it sounds really good, better than me singing alone.

Also, I encountered a problem. Today while I was recording, my Mic got crazy and picked up a wind noise. I still haven't figured what it is, but I'll bringing it over to Mr. Heurich tommorrow and try to see what happened to it. This is crucial because I can't return it since there are only a few days left. All I need is to pray and cross my fingers that it's not broken, hoping it's a temporally thing...

What is needed for successful presentation (Research)

So on Thursday, there was a sample presentation by Carrie which i thought was really successful. I'd like to jot down a few reasons that made presentation awesome and should try to incorporate those in my presentation too.

• Know what you are doing. Carrie seemed like she knew what exactly she was doing like an expert. She was able to tell a lot of information related to slam poetry to audience and it kept them interested.
• Talk with a passion. She also really liked what she was doing and was eager to tell us what happened during all the process. 
• Gestures and eye contacts. This is the most basic stuff about presentation, but still the hardest thing to do for some people. I am one of them since I haven't done a lot of presentation in my life. Carrie enthusiastically used her gestures and made an eye contact with audiences, which kept everybody in focus.
• Talk about every detail that happened during the project. 6 months are not short time. There must have been a lot of tings that went well and bad. She told lots of stories about those and I was able to picture in my mind what she has been doing so far
• Excellent Q & A session. After the presentation was over, she was able to answer many different kinds of questions with a great fluency. It's probably because she knew everything she did in depth and this made her seem like she was an expert about this field.

These were the things I took notes on, and lastly, practice makes it perfect.I'm 100% sure that it wasn't her first run. Judy even mentioned that she has practiced a lot throughout the day of presentation. Since mine is after a weekend, i should devote all my time practicing the presentation to finish it without any flaws.

Sample presentation.

6:00 at York. Today was the first day a wise student had her presentation. Although it was a sample one, it still was a legitimate presentation. Everybody had to show up for the credit and so did i, even taking a day off at work. The name of the presenter was Carrie, which I first thought was Harry. Her topic was on slam poetry.I didn't know what it was even though I've seen a few posters hanging around in school hallways, advertising there will be a poetry slam at school library. It was as the name suggests, reading out poem, but with actions. She performed a few different poems, as well as the reasons that let her choose to do this project. Carrie said that she has been a poet for a long time, but for the wise project, she needed something that is challenging. That part was the action part, since she has never done it before. The presentation also revealed a lot about herself. I was able to know what kind of person she is, and how much effort she has put in to finish this. The hand written journal that she wrote everyday definitely was a great example that she tried really hard and I was really impressed by it. My presentation is only about two weeks left and I'm not even done recording stuff. The deadline is suffocating me and the presentation reminded me that i should as well do my best until the journey ends.

Orchestra band concert (Research)

This afternoon was awesome. My family had a tiny barbeque and i also got a new iPhone, which made my day (or year). After eating dinner, my mom and i set off to high school to watch my sister playing in an orchestra. Although I've played a few instruments in my life, I have never engaged myself in playing those types of instruments. My sister was playing flute in the band, and when every single instruments were added up and created a euphony, it couldn't have been sounded better than that.

Anyways, the performance was great. There were two groups of quartets that played great music and the last pieces, which was star wars theme songs, were amazing. Meanwhile, I tried to figure out how the high or low sound was made. For example, looking at a flute, i could see it has a thin and a long body while a sax has a huge and relatively short body. And then i thought, since the pitch of the sound is determined by the frequency, (higher frequency, higher note) the narrower body gives room for more reflection of the sound, thus it will have a higher frequency, while the larger body will take more time for sounds to reflect off, then it will have a lower frequency.

There, there is the secret to the pitch of a sound!

Advices for next year's WISE hopefuls.

Hey everybody! I'm so glad that you guys are going to take WISE next year. Well, I'm sure you guys are all excited about the freedom you will enjoy once the 2nd semester comes. Taking English off everyday can't sound better than anything, eh? That was one of the reasons that lured me into this program. Thanks to that, I have 1,2,3,4 free periods everyday but Monday. What a life. But on the other hand, there are many things you need to go through. First, you'll have to cover everything that other kids learn in a year in 6 months. That means you'll need to twice the amount of work everyday. And once thats over, you'll have to keep journal entries almost every other day, do the work, meet the mentor and just so many things in a span of 6 months. Those stuff could be really boring and hard sometimes. But at the same time, you'll learn tons of things. It's like living in a real society. The most important thing I've learned is discipline. Wise is a course that requires a tons of timeliness. Because if you fall behind, for example in writing journal entries, you'll have to make up for that, and if you keep doing that, you'll end up with tons of work, just like me. 

Anyways, if you think you could keep up with all these work, you'll learn so much stuff during you are doing WISE, and once your project is all done, you well feel proud of yourself like never before. So, hopefuls, why don't you give it a shot?

Future plans

Now all the tough times are gone and the good times are coming. From yesterday, I'm done working on every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays. I'll be busy only on Thursday, and the rest of the time is mine. This means that I will have much more time I can spend on my wise project. So, on the following week, I hope to finish

• Recording Guitar part without any mistake (and master it too)
• Same thing for piano (but I'm not sure if i want to include that or not)
• Ask my friend to record the drum part for me since I can't play drum
• If I can get the transposed version of sheet music, sing that a lot to perfect it so that i can record it on the following week. 

Once it's transposed, I'll need to adjust things to the different key of the song but I doubt this will take tons of time though. Hopefully I can get the things done in time and get prepared for my presentation too, which  will be on June 13th, about 3 weeks from today.

Meeting with Mr.Heurich

Instead of not coming to school and sleeping late in the morning, I woke up earlier thatn usual (7:30) and went to school for the meeting with Mr.Heurich. The reason why we met up in the morning was to go over the basic recording stuff and I had some questions about my Mic. I frist thought my Mic was not functioning correctly because of the whtie noise, or the room noise, but it turned out that my Mic was fine and I was just being paranoid about it. We also covered some topics on editing, or mastering in a 'musical' term. There are so many things I still need to learn, but during this time, i learned about reverb, which is mimicing the room sound. This induces echo effects and simulates as if the sound was made in a studio. There was also something called equalizer, which as the name suggets, equalize the suond. By this, i mean balancing the sound by the wavelength of it. It goes, lower the pitch, lower the wavelength. The concept of editing is really complicated that it can take years to learn this. I think it's better if i contact one of the community members and learn briefly about it.

Also, reminders to myself.

• Obtain a pop filter from Mr.Lesser
• Transposed version of sheet music from Mr.Lesser
• Contact a local musician or a professor at IC

Last singing lesson

I just had my last singing lesson today. Although it's been not that many times, a few hours of learning and practicing has guided me well enough that i know what i should do every time i face difficulty. I'm not saying i became a perfect singer. It's just i know the possible solutions to the problems and the rest is up on me. The more time i spend on practicing, the better result I will get. In this journal entry I want to sum up the lessons I've learned so far.

• Try to push the voice out of my mouth. This way, I get much clearer voice and it could be heard better to the others. I tend to close up my mouth which blocks the way that sounds can go.
• Try to hold the breath as long as possible and when singing high notes, squeeze my abs all the way as I'm pooping. This way the sound stabilizes and i could sing high notes without crack ups.
• Pronunciation matters a lot too. I tend to not enunciate when I'm singing. I would like to attribute this to my tiny mouth...
• Try to do my best when singing even tiny things. Attitude is also an important factor.

First guitar recording

This is a Korean song called 'Magic castle'. It also has lyrics with it, but I only recorded the guitar part of it. During this, i made some mistakes and i also realized that my Mic picks up a lot of nosies. I am going to talk about that with Mr.Heuric tomorrow and figure out what's wrong with this. The sound of the video is really small, so its best if you turn the volume up to maximum.

During this process, i also learned how to make a youtube video with Windows Movie Maker and how to embed a youtube video in my blog. What a meaningful day it is!

Guitars!

Although I've been playing guitar for a long time in my life, I didn't play with whole lot of fun every time. Sometimes my mom forced me to play, and sometime i just played to finish my 'homework' indifferently. However, beginning from this year, i found my love towards guitar again. During that process, I had to change from classical guitar to normal guitar but the transition was easier because classical guitar had a wider frat, which was harder to play chords. However, playing on a narrower guitar was much more comfortable and easy for me to play around with, and I also loved the sound of the guitar too.

Before playing this new type of guitar, i thought it would just be silly and not cool,but i realized that this is really useful and immersing. Everyday, I play guitar whether its 10 minutes or a few hours, and still, it only makes me want to play some more and more. Actually, I think I'm going to buy a new guitar since the one I'm owning right now is not mine. I borrowed it from my neighbor. So I've been looking up the models I want to buy and it narrowed it down to taylor 214ce or 314ce. Those two are really famous, and expensive as well. Its $1000 and $1600 in that order, but the only difference is that 314ce is made out of single wood while 214ce is made out of many pieces of same woods. I'm still not sure if i should buy it or save money and do some other things, but they just look awesome and attractive. I've played those in Ithaca guitar works and will play it some other time to make up my mind.

Transposing the song

After some thoughts, Mr.Lesser and I agreed on transposing the song. We thought that it's not worth singing a song when i'm struggling every seconds during the process. And luckily enough, Mr.Lesser's wife is a piano teacher and she has majored in music related major. So thanks to her, i don't need to pay a ton of money transposing the song and my project will be much more feasible. Again, I really thank Mr & Ms.Lesser for helping me! Anyways, we decided to drop a key, which will change the entire song, which includes guitar, bass and piano. I haven't recorded anything yet, which is partly because of my laziness, but it turned out that this saves my time a bunch. Once it's transposed, and since I'm going to quit working from next week, I will have free time everyday except on Thursdays, which will give me solid time to work on this. Also there is about a month before my presentation date, so I really need to get working.

Tiny lesson from my friend

My friends came and dined at a restaurant I was working at, so we decided to go to church when i was done with it. Church is a great place to practice piano and singing because the hall is large and there is nobody, so i feel comfortable singing in that place. It also has a natural 'surrounding sound' system, because the sounds are reflected off the wall and bounces back to me.

When we got there, i sang 'I'm yours' to one of my friends, because she was good at singing. She has been in a church choir when she was young and has been practicing singing for a while. After she listened to the first part of it, she insisted me that i lack in these fields

• Breathing is way too shot so that i seem to confuse where to breathe and where to release my breath.
• Pronunciation is sometimes incorrect. I think its because i don't pay attention to what i'm saying when i'm singing.

Those were two main things she said, but I think i can work on pronunciation. Its the breathing part that really matters. If i transpose the song, it might be easier to sing more comfortably.

Practice, practice and practice

As the deadline comes and time flies by, I'm getting really nervous because there are still many things to do, but i'm not even close to be done with one of those many things. And the most annoying things is that it's extremely hard to get better at sining in this short amount of time. The project would have been much easier if I had started singing earlier in my life. However, unluckily enough, this was the year that i actively started singing and didn't know my limits.

As many things frustrate me, I'm trying to do my best to change these things. I've read so many posts about singing in a Korean website. It's a forum that mostly deals with the singing techniques and q&as. Though not all the posts are helpful, I'm learning many new things in that forum. One of the posts said breathing is the most important part of singing. It's because you produce sound with pressure and the air you inhaled. Singing is all about manipulating those two components. Yeah, the theory goes like that and i decided to trust on that. I tried to practice abnormal breathing in a way that i described a long time ago. Even though I'm not experiencing the result right away, if i keep on practicing, there will be a great boost in my abiltiy.

Helping out Alexi's skit.

Sunday afternoon. The weather was really great, the sky was blue, the sun was shinny but still, the wind was chilly, reminding me that Ithaca's weather is always unpredictable. Anyways, Alexi wanted me to be a part of his skit so he's been asking me to come from Friday, yesterday and today. With his earnest request, I was in a situation where I had to go willy-nilly. Upon my arrival, there was Marcel and Luke, also actors of the skit. Ian was there too, but he was in charge of filming everything. 

Surprisingly, Alexi didn't have any written script with him, so we kinda had to free style everything. And at the same time, I've really never been in a film or any type of recordings. I was a little bit anxious and puzzled but I tried my best to do what I can and it turned out that some scenes were really satisfactory. However, overall, i personally think he needed some more preparation. Since we are students, not professional actors, we weren't really confident at what we were doing and there were lots of differences in opinions. We had to spend some time inefficiently, just because we couldn't reach to a consensus. Although a little frenzy, it was a great hands on experience, which reminded me how hard the wise project could be and how much effort I should put in.

Internal Conclict

So i guess the AP week is bothering all the students in our wise class. I wasn't an exception. Monday, i had to take APES test and today i took AP Calc test. It was a horrible on one of the free response questions, i couldn't answer anything there. I left it blank. Anyways, these days, as the deadline is coming and my singing skills don't make a huge progress, I started to doubt myself if i can actually pull this off or not. Looking through many forums, i learned that the way I've been singing is not the correct way, because I've been producing sound in a wrong way. Well, there is no right or wrong way when singing, but based on what i've been researching, it just seems like my way is wrong.

• There shouldn't be any stress around the neck when singing high pitches. This interferes voice from coming out and hurts your vocal chords.
• No yelling when singing is allowed. Never.
• New way to practice: Try to sing a single note as long as i can. This is really helpful way to relieve stress in the neck. Singers can do it for more than 40 seconds, while i only last about 15~20 seconds.

Yea, so these are the things and i'm still uncertain that if i could do this or not... Somebody please help me!