Day 8 - Getting Aural

Pagan Ways filk will need to wait for a bit.  I think it'd be a perfect adaptation, but creative gears aren't spinning fast enough just yet.  So today was all about singing and aural practice instead.

Recently I taught my Year 4 students all about why string instruments need to be tuned.  I did this by getting two of my students to hold a rope between them, tug-of-war style, and then to imagine doing that for three whole days without ever putting it down.

"You can't do it, can you?  Neither can a guitar peg."

That then led to a discussion on frequencies - not a very big one since they were glazing a bit by that point - but they did grasp the idea that two notes next to each other still had a lot of room between them, like two stars in the night sky, and any note that falls between them is technically incorrect.

When I sing, 99.9% of the notes I hit are in that grey area - just like every singer in the world except for those autotuned pop-tarts.  So a good singer has to be good enough to hear that they're in that grey area - even if they're only just there - and adjust their voices to get as close to the sweet spot as they can.  As close to the perfect frequency for the note they're going for.  Violin players do the same thing - they're masters at adjusting their fingering slightly even after they've started playing the note to make sure it's in the perfect place, well before any audience pleb has picked up on it.

I usually like singing with a recording behind me, to give me the notes to aim for, but even without the recording I can hear when the notes I'm singing are incorrect.  When there's music behind me, I adjust automatically.  So today was spent singing without any music, so that I could really hear the incorrect notes.

There were a lot of them.  Need to do more of this in the future.

Day 9 - Filk This!

I've been debating a fun little challenge for myself for a while - the idea of filking every song from a single Disney movie. Roobi likes Disney, and laughing, and my singing, so it'd be a nice way to combine the lot of them.

Mulan seems like a good choice, since a lot of the music isn't interrupted by random speech like in other Disney movies, and also because I've already done some of the work. I got most of the way through filking "I'll Make a Man Out of You", and at least have ideas for some others. Today's 10 minutes was spent gathering them and putting a few more touches on some.

Ideas for the project:

Honour to Us All: This could keep its name, though I could spell it in the un-Americanised way, and simply change to a mixture of SCA accomplishments and a few of the more hilarious ideas people have on what they should be proud of.

Tin of fruit, bag of chip
Big glass bottles that will never drip
Carry groceries in just one trip
I'll bring honour to us all


A Girl Worth Fighting For:  Idea for this one would be a song based around Lochac's attendance and dominance at international tournaments like Pennsic.  Working title:  A Lochac Fighting Corp.


I'll Make a Man Out of You: The work for this one has mostly already been done, based on the College of Saint Basil the Great's lunch services offered at the annual Pencampwr weekend.  Given that our regular inclusion of purple carrots to the stew tended to turn the entire thing purple, recipients quite enjoyed the taste but were unable to identify any of the components.  Comments on Facebook drove me into writing this filk in just under half an hour - I'll Make a Mystery Stew.  Lyrics to be posted later.

I'm sure Mulan has more songs with words, but they currently escape my memory.  Maybe tomorrow I'll watch it again and call that my 10 minutes.