When practice doesn't quite make perfect

Occasionally I write a song that's hard for me to sing. I don't mean emotionally. I mean technically. Maybe part of it is out of my range, or there's a note I have to sustain for a long time without breathing.

"You're the writer," I hear you cry. "Why would you make it difficult for yourself?" Well, mostly I don't. If I can, I tailor my songs to my strengths. But every once in a while it just doesn't sound as good the easy way. So I write it the way I think it should sound, and then practice the hell out of it.

Hold Me in Your Arms is a good example. It's a love song, and it begins with me humming over a minimal piano accompaniment. The notes would be in my range if I were na-na-ing them, but they're uncomfortably low when hummed. To do the passage without cracking or sounding weak, I have to hold my face in a way that doesn't obstruct the airflow.

Practicing this has helped a lot, but I still haven't been able to count on hitting the notes consistently.

Yesterday at rehearsal, I sang the song for the first time in a while. And just before we started, a thought popped into my head. What if I just hummed louder?

Yep. That did it. I'd been humming softly for a more sultry effect, but going louder didn't change the feel. All I had to do was back off the mic a little.

Practice is good. But sometimes it helps to come to a sticky spot fresh.

Sticking points

I've finally gotten an air-conditioning unit installed in the tiny room that doubles as my office and practice space. Good news, as Tucson temperatures have climbed into triple digits. This means I can work all day without risking heatstroke. Even better, now that conditions don't violate OSHA regulations, I can finally get my piano tuner in there.

This needs to happen as soon as possible, as my piano has spent the past week or so committing acts of mutiny. First the B below middle C started sticking. Then D above middle C did the same thing. Then G below middle C wanted a piece of the action, deciding that sometimes it would play F# when pressed.

I'm doing the best I can to ignore all of this when I play, but ... You know how you sound when your dentist asks you a question, and you answer the best you can with both of her hands in your mouth?

Yeah. Like that.

Practice makes ...

As you may have noticed from my last post, I've been feeling kind of down about my lack of musical achievements of late. Also pessimistic about my ability to turn that around. Opportunities abound. Barriers to opportunities also abound. My motivation to find my way around the latter to get to the former have been low.

Today I practiced. It was the first time in a week or so that my fingers made contact with keys. When I finished, my outlook was a little better. Not so much for my ability to overcome the barriers, but for my worth as a human being. Music is something I can do. Okay, I haven't found a vast audience to hear us play. Music is still something I can do.

Siren song

One nice thing about visiting the parental homestead is that I've had a little more time to practice. They own a Steinway grand, inherited from my grandparents, and that serves my purposes very nicely.

Just one thing makes practicing feel awkward: the vocal warmups.

It's hard to explain without a sound sample, which I don't have and would prefer not to provide. What you're supposed to do is sing the vowel "E." You start as low as you can and go up—not singing a scale, but hitting every pitch there is in between the usual notes. You go as high as you can without tripping over your register break (the pitch between your chest voice and head voice), then go back down the same way. It sounds kind of like an ambulance siren going by.

eeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeee

This is an excellent warmup. This is also not something I want other people, like, say, my parents, to hear.

So far I've been doing them just after my morning shower. The hair dryer drowns me out. I hope.

Practice, practice, practice

I got to practice for 45 minutes tonight!

They weren't 45 consecutive minutes, but whatever.

My relationship with practicing has changed over time. As a kid I hated it. For the first three or four years I took piano lessons, my mother sat with me every night to make sure I didn't slack off. If not for her, I wouldn't have made it five minutes without abandoning whatever I was working on to plink out something much easier.

She had to prod me into doing anything that challenged me, like, say, playing a piece with both hands at the same time after I'd learned to play the left- and right-hand parts separately.

Putting the hands together sucked. I didn't like that at all.

Eventually I could handle practicing without my mom looking over my shoulder. Sometimes I'd even find a groove. Practicing a leap over and over again, contemplating the smallness of this act within the immensity of the universe, was the closest I've ever gotten to meditation. Despite these moments of grace, however, it was usually just boring.

Fast forward a couple decades and change. I have responsibilities. Lots. The world doesn't care whether I practice. The world throws many obstacles in my path when I try, obstacles that provide ample excuses not to bother.

The result? Practicing is less of a burden, more of a privilege. OK, there are still times when I come home from a long day at work, and the prospect of sitting down to do a different kind of work doesn't thrill me. But having to fight for the time to do nothing but improve my playing and singing makes me appreciate it a whole lot more.

45 minutes. Yay!

Time mismanagement

Tonight's rehearsal was cancelled due to drummer illness. I used the unexpected free time to attend to some personal tasks I'd been neglecting. Unfortunately, this left no time for solo practice.

I hadn't gotten to the personal tasks before tonight because I've been spending more time practicing.

I'm still way behind on both the personal stuff and the musician stuff.

If I made mortgage payments the way I deal with my time debts, the bank would have foreclosed long ago.

When the day job isn't

I got some practicing in today. Just a little.

Normally that wouldn't be worth mentioning. It is now because this was the first chance I've had to practice in over two weeks. Things have gotten rather busy at the day job.

I often refer to it as the "day job." I do this because it makes me feel more musicianly. You know, like I'm really a singer/songwriter/keyboardist, and my current employment is just something I do to pay the bills. But the truth is that my day job -- book designer at a small self-publishing company -- isn't the kind where you get in at 8, leave at 5, and don't give it a second thought until you arrive again the next morning. I actually enjoy it. And every now and again it demands that I devote more time to it than eight hours a day. A lot more.

It's earned my loyalty many times over. The hours are flexible. If I have a gig scheduled for 3 p.m. on a Wednesday, I simply e-mail the office saying I'm cutting out early because I have a gig. Back when Ron and I flew to Philadelphia to record our album, I had been at my job less than a year and hadn't accrued any vacation time; my boss let me work Saturdays to make up the five days off beforehand. Also, I regularly meander into the office around 10 or 10:30 a.m. OK, that has nothing to do with working around musical activities -- I just like to sleep late -- but I don't appreciate it any less for that.

So I'm working a lot now. And in the interim I've hardly touched my keyboard. And I haven't done anything at all to promote the band. Maybe I should consider these sacrifices as an investment. Eventually things will calm down and I'll once again be able to take advantage of the freedom this job gives me when it comes to gigs and such.

But I still feel like I'm shirking.

The practice of practice

All the vocal practicing I do falls into one of two broad categories. The first of these is technique. Here, I attend to things like pitch control, articulation, projection, range, and generally not sucking. I focus intently on specific parts of songs that need work, repeating them over and over again until (hopefully) I start to hear improvement.

The second category is maintenance. Maintenance involves running songs from beginning to end, seeing if I can get through them without any big mistakes.

I tend to spend more time on maintenance. It's easier and more fun. There's also more of a need for it if a gig is coming up. Unfortunately, this tendency hinders improvement. The thing that separates masters from amateurs in any area, be it chess, tennis, music, or vintage Donkey Kong, is that masters attend mindfully to every facet of their performance as they practice, striving to make each one better.

So for the past couple weeks, I've resolved to spend more time on technique. In particular, I've been working on extending my upper range. (For all y'all who have never heard Cinder Bridge, I have an unusually low voice for a woman, and it's hard for me to reach "high notes" that most tenors can hit without difficulty.) We had a gig coming up on the 13th, but I figured I could get a lot of the maintenance-style work done during band rehearsal.

Well, stuff happened. Rehearsal was called due to illness -- drummer had to take care of an ailing kitty. Then other responsibilities (and horrible time management) got in the way of my doing the maintenance I needed to do. I feared that all my great attention to technique would result in me singing "na na na" really well as I struggled to remember the lyrics to my own songs.

As it turns out, last night's gig was cancelled. One of the proprietors of the coffeehouse in which we were to perform got sick, and they decided they'd probably close early.

I was not nearly as disappointed as I should have been.

Next Friday we have a gig at Old Town Artisans. Between then and now, I will find a way to balance these categories of practice.