Keeping Current

An incomplete list for myself of things to keep up with. Things I want to keep progressing with more or less continuously and directions of improvement.

• Current politics and news

-Re-listen to this podcast, an amazingly detailed account of the middle-east at the moment: 

-Buy Michael Weiss' book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

-Buy The Siege of Mecca

-George Pell drama

• Meditation

-Sam Harris' guided meditations. Try to at least do the 9-minute one daily. 

• Exercise

-Keep going, more small daily sets

-Less eating late at night and more vegetables, prepared meals

-Use EMS device a more

• Stretching, balance, flexibility

-Daily joint and tendon stretch

• Singing

-All good, keep going.

• Being more organized generally, and with teaching work specifically

Notifications for unusual lesson times, keeping role up-to-date

• Camping/spearing gear

-Better snorkel

-Weight belt

-Fix wet suit, currently has a hole where my butt is.

-Bag/Duffel bag

-Light non-cotton pants

-Boots

-Cup/plate/cutlery

-Drinking bottle

-Tent

-

• French

-Keep up with Duolingo

-Listen the Pimsleur/Michel Thomas audio more often

TO BE UPDATED

Turning a youtube channel into a podcast feed

Go to the channel.
i.e. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLH7qUqM0PLieCVaHA7RegA

Copy the last portion 
i.e. UCLH7qUqM0PLieCVaHA7RegA

Put "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=" before it (without the quotes) i.e. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCLH7qUqM0PLieCVaHA7RegA

Put this URL into your podcast manager.

ez.

Shittyish Singing Practice Routine

More disorganized music-related stuff. Keeping to posting every day as a practice for a while.

I am really not a singer, but do backing vocals for my band so I want to get better at singing. Here is what I do (it is by no means a professional, or even well-designed routine but it works for me):

Warm up singing notes up and down my range (happens to go from a bit lower than the guitar's open fat E string to about the A above middle C (fret 5 on thinnest string). I want to work on accuracy and vibrato so I will do this 3 times with a 60 bpm metronome (1 click per second), firstly with 2 vibrato waves per tap, then 3, then 4. All of this while playing the notes on a guitar. Apparently vibrato usually is 5-7 waves per second so I'm working up to that. As an aside, I usually go up and down with a different diminished arpeggio each time because the notes are evenly spaced. 

A simple exercise to get how to do vibrato initially is to pretend you are starting a faulty car, so it sort of goes:
RRRrrrrrrRRRRrrrrrrRRRR etc. 
You should try not to use your mouth or diaphragm but rather your vocal cords to achieve vibrato. 

Sometimes I will use a tuner to show me how far I'm deviating from the desired note, the visual feedback helps with staying accurate.

I'll then sing a few songs along with the guitar, sometimes recording myself on my phone to get feedback, which was initially very painful to listen to.

Here are the songs I sing most in case someone is interested:

• Simon and Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning 3am. The higher harmony in the key of C, then D then the lower one in the key of F.
• Turin Brakes - Feeling Oblivion. Key of F (original key is too high for me).
• Johnny Cash: Hurt
• Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire
• Alice in Chains: Nutshell
• John Mayer: Stop this Train

That's it. I usually will do about 3/4 of what's above, or sometimes a bit more, about 5 days per week as well as singing during rehearsals and of course in the shower. I have noticed some good improvement over the ~4 months that I've done it. 

One drawback is I sing pretty quietly because I'm somewhat self-conscious about it, but as my control improves the self-consciousness lessens. 

Finally, I am conscious about posture and possible injury (for example resting if I feel tiredness in the vocal cords). This should always be researched I believe. I am not too worried about a more extensive routine generally because I'm somewhat happy where I'm at and happy to progress slowly over the course of months/years.

Random music thing

First post, so just going to write random unstructured things for now. Maybe more structured content later. These would normally be private notes but I'm publishing them in order to be less cowardly, even though no one will probably read them.

This one is music related.

Practicing guitar soloing for a track for my band, Delusions of Grandeur (Jason Bossio gets most of the writing credit). This song is at a moderate tempo, pretty heavy, in the key of Em. The backing includes darker blues/rock notes, like the b2 (F) and the b5 (Bb) a lot. 

- Using G minor pentatonic notes for tension and resolving to a more inside note (i.e. notes from the Em chord) sounds great. Includes the darker notes, not overly outside (as, for example, Bbm would be), and as an existing common scale serves as a good heuristic for implementing known patterns without too much thought. 

In general: 
- Find a different key/shape (i.e. pentatonic) different to the key of the song that includes some of the notes you want to emphasize, as a way to not have to think about those notes individually (so you can play faster, think less, whatever).