Teddy Talk

Whew, Ted talk is over. Praise the lawd. Lord. Whatever you may choose to call your deity, praise it.So, I think that Max and I had a great presentation. Our song performance was alright. We were both definitely nervous, and the setup took a pretty long time. However, the actual presentation was great. We weren't super formal and scripted, we were more genuine and closer to the audience. We talked to the people, not at them. This makes a connection with the listeners, in the true TED talk spirit. We were definitely ambitious, maybe a bit too ambitious, but that was good. It's always good to have fighting spirit (row row). Our main idea, although a little played out, was refreshed by our application, and hopefully given new life. We spoke in pretty accessible terms, which is easy to do when talking about music, considering the almost completely alternate language. We definitely gave a lot of examples, stories, and introspection into our experiences, which was good. I definitely got some laughs, which is good. Not much crying though. We didn't sell from the stage, at all. Honestly, Max and I hardly used our notecards, which I feel makes it more heart t heart, because we're speaking what we really want to say, instead of overly formal scripted speeches. We went a little over on time, but the presentation would be bad without the time we took. I rehearsed my talk in front of a trusted friend, because I was presenting with said friend. Overall, I'd give us a 93% to 95%. Good job, me. And you too Max. Good on you.

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Congratulations, Shinji

So. It's finally over. All recording is finished, all the work done. CDs burned, exquisite album art drawn, CD cases prepped. TED talk rehearsed, notecards prepared, Powerpoint polished. It feels so... weird. For the past seven weeks, I put in well over 40 hours of work into this project, not counting Max's time spent too. Speaking of Max, I spent an average of 10 hours a day with him, through school and working on the project after school. I lost sleep, as I'm doing now, I hit things and felt happy. The whole experience has been very enriching to me, and I've learned so much. My library of new knowledge ranges from musical to practical to life lessons. I learned how to drum so others can play along, I learned how to play guitar and bass, I learned how to nudge a track in reaper so as to synchronize a song. I learned how to vent frustration without breaking lamps or bones, I learned what it's like to put hard work into something I really care about. That's the thing about this project - whilst I give effort to other school assignments, this is the one I truly gave a damn about. I enjoyed what I was doing, I knew it would help me, and I wanted it to be as good as I could make it. Thus, I worked as hard as I've ever worked on a project ever before, let alone any school assignment. Hopefully, I will reap the rewards I have sewn, with my two hands, and feet, and all of my body and mind.
Thanks for reading, and goodnight.

Good News and Bad

Believe it or not, my spring break was a magical adventure in music and education, and I learned much about the structure of the human emotions, and in turn much about myself as a person, as a student, as a musician, and as a thinking being.
But seriously, I did make progress on this project, as opposed to playing Skyrim for 216 straight hours. Given, I did play a lot of Skyrim. Anyway, I learned a few things in the process of doing this project over spring break, be they good things or bad.
To start with the good news: I'm a lot better at guitar than I thought previously. This is due to my purchasing some shiny new .008 gauge strings. For those of you who do not play guitar, those are very skinny strings. I didn't play guitar too much before the project, but now I've begun to play it more out of necessity. I wrote most of the music used in the project on guitar. So, I learned the major scale and learned basic chords, but I wasn't too good. At this point, I had started to get the swing of the guitar, and started to be able to know what sounds good with what. This is most likely due to my prior education in piano and music theory, which is the difficult part of music. Now that I know music theory, I can pick up other instruments much easier. However, I really got better once  replaced the strings. These are much easier to push down, which lets me do barre chords, tapping, hammer-ons, and everything else much easier. That's the good thing.
Now for the bad news.
I was recording vocals for our cover of Beck's Sea Change (beautiful song, you can listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9i6Bu4knEM) by singing along to the track and just recording my voice. So, after I finished that take, I listened to it, and it was bad. So, I figured it was just a one-off thing, and I tried again. No change.
I cannot sing for #$%^.
Seriously, if I had to sing on the street for my living, I'd be starving. That or I'd make money from people thinking I'm a comedy act. This deflated me very thoroughly, and I was very sad about my lack of vocal proficiency. I guess I should just stick to what I'm good at, and not take those things for granted. So, overall, spring break was fairly productive for me. I spent time on my project and got stuff done. That and I played a lot of Skyrim. I like Skyrim.