With life settling into a makeshift routine, I’ve found time the last several days to practice. This blog post shares a few memories from this time period, as well as my efforts to develop vocal abilities that could be used in live-art performances.
Background
A dream that I pursued during this time was the goal of mixing together many of the artistic endeavors I’ve pursued over the years into a collection of mixed-media stories. Perhaps such a mixed-media performance could include music, writing, and even some illustrated backgrounds or conceptual art.
Out of all of my skill sets, the one that is least developed, and yet would need the most work for such a performance, is my voice.
My original artistic pursuit in my teenage years was classical and jazz saxophone. There is hardly a day that goes by that I do not think a grateful thought to my many music teachers. My music studies lasted through approximately one year of college, before my creative interests led elsewhere.
A Spidery Side Note
While I’m sitting here writing this, a giant wolf spider hanging by its spider thread just descended from the high garage ceiling above me right down in front of my eyes. I let him drop to the concrete floor and scurry under my raggedy arm chair. Fitting it is that a weaver from mother nature would weave a web under my seat as I attempt to weave together the many threads of my own life.
Why Singing?
Why did I spend my precious available time for the arts on singing? Since my memories are related to saxophone, why try a different instrument?
A fun thought that I pursued is to transfer what vestiges of saxophone talent and remaining music-related memories to a format that could be integrated directly along with my writing.
Wouldn’t it be fun to write a short story — perhaps a personal essay or even a whimsical fairy tale — that included one’s own lyrical poems? Perhaps I could perform these poems in-person as a part of my sharing of the work?
Furthermore, an intriguing aspect of singing is that it relies on our own body as an instrument. Performing with our voice can allow us to strip a musical and poetic story down to the bare and natural minimum, as naked in tone as the sounds our ancestors made before the first musical instrument was invented.
A Few Memories
Before I share my vlog and audio-log progress, here are a few more scattered memories from the week.
A Visitor With Fresh Eyes
While I was exercising on my rowing machine, my five-year-old son came skipping into my garage.
“Dad, guess what I have?”
“What?” I asked, stopping my rower and pressing pause on my workout routine.
“A ladybug,” he replied, and opened his tiny hand. A reddish-yellow lady bug came crawling into sight, desperately trying to escape the maze of young human flesh.
“Pretty cool.”
“Ya, isn’t it?” he said, still engrossed in his captured prey. Without another word, he closed his fist around the creature, turned, and skipped out of the garage.
Little Gardeners
Our family is taking care of watering the school garden for the weekend. I water the plants while my children play in the garden play area.
To get water to the garden, we have to hook up a large steel lever to the nearest fire hydrant and twist the hydrant open. This pumps water through a series of fire-hose contraptions that transfer the water pressure into a regular garden hose. The regular garden hose we insert into four large garbage bins that serve as buckets.
In theory, we can turn on the hydrant just one time, fill the bins with water, and that should be enough to water all the rows of plants.
What I didn’t count on when I started this project was that whenever my back is turned, my children will come to the bins and fill up their own watering jugs for play. They splash the water around the garden, making mud pies.
Seeing my little gardeners wander around the small field, watering their make-believe plants and turning their imaginary harvests into pretend meals for each other is easily worth the trouble of turning on the fire hydrant an extra time or two.
Weekly Logs
Here are skill-building logs from this last week. Keep your expectations low. 🙂
Weekend Performance
2025-07-10
2025-07-19
Practice Session Audio Logs
2025-07-14
2025-07-15
2025-07-17
2025-07-19
General Session Records
Date
Duration
Notes
2025-07-10
15
Sang “Oo-de-lolly” on YouTube, and also read some Icelandic.
2025-07-11
30
Watched and sang along to the Berkley “Vocal Technique” mp4. Will write down the notes tomorrow.
2025-07-12
68
Took detailed notes on Berklee Music Vocal Technique video.
2025-07-13
45
Took detailed notes on Berklee Music Vocal Technique video.
2025-07-14
21
Did the Vocal Technique warm up. Recorded the audio.
2025-07-15
45
Did the vocal routine from Berklee and Moon River. Recorded on phone. Much better microphone quality.
2025-07-16
60
Went through the Berklee Vocal Technique routine again. Sang Moon River twice on my own. Spent some time trying to get my audio files to load so that I can start analyzing using Tony etc.
2025-07-17
63
Did Vocal Technique Berklee and Moon River.
2025-07-18
62
Berklee Vocal Technique routine. Moon River.
2025-07-19
67
Berklee Vocal Technique. Moon River. Recorded weekly Vlog.
Artificial Intelligence Transparency Report
No artificial intelligence was used for the writing or performing portion of this blog post.
I used Google’s Gemini AI to help me write a sql script to export my database records of my practice sessions into a .csv format, and convert that table into the above HTML table, as seen above.
How You Can Help
I need your help to become established as a teacher and storyteller.
