These 3 months is giving me a reasonable amt of time to improve in terms of musicianship and i wanna share it with you girls!

4. Take up voice lessons formally

I went for recording yesterday to sing in what i have not sang since my gigs -- in CHINESE. I was doing it as a favour for KeithPoon who was doing a demo at yellowbox studios. And from what i gathered and experienced in the studio from the engineers as well as keith, i couldn't really emote the song very well.

Well, i have a few hypothesis at hand:

1. Singing in Chinese is a bit different from English.

well, u might disagree (the engineer did) but here's my argument. Really, I think its nothing to do with the nature of the language itself, but rather that I have been used to emoting myself (all my originals are in english yes) in English and all my recording jobs were sung in english (save the most recent one which i had to imitate children singing 世上只有妈妈好). I think the words that i can relate to are in english nowadays, so although chinese lyrics i can understand, they're less... relatable in that sense? Not sure if i'm doing myself justice in this explanation but hahahhaha ohwells! But I have to agree that during the initial stages of recording, I was VERY conscious of my pronunciation (and vibrato, see point 3).

And thats why some emotions can be better expressed when u phrase it in a different way. Like... say "你转身后的气氛" (copyrights under 竹子). Maybe I would sing this phrase and accent the 气氛 at the end. But for Chinese singing, 转身后的 would be more accented. Just an example lah, cuz this was what happened XD So when i accented 气氛, it didn't sit well with the producer and engineer.

hahaha. i NEVER, absolutely NEVER thought I would actually hear such comments at all! cuz the above 2 points about being expressive in a song is always a common in the studio, songs need emotions, so thats a must and i might've lacked that when i sang in chinese. But I was actually quite surprised that my vibrato was the MAIN CHALLENGE for the recording. I "dou" too much already! hahahahhaha. In retrospect, despite feeling apologetic that my inner singing deficiencies slowed down the recording, its quite funny as it dug up quite a few memories of my childhood! I remember singing when i was young and getting freaked out by my vibrato and i stopped doing it until a started classical singing where vibrato made songs sound better! hahahahahah. But i felt sorry for the 2 engineers and keithpoon cuz i struggled alot muffling (KILLING) my vibrato for this song and thus wasting a lot of time. So here I am consciously putting the vibrato out of the singing, and doing many retakes cuz my awareness in singing (unfortunately) killed the emotions i was supposed to express in the song (about breakup).

Really damn cool experience on this one cuz I thought making these noises were quite funny/embarassing/sick/_______ (anything negative). It was really funny cuz they asked me to make some of this sounds and i did one (note: the main intention was really to show my disagreement and my lack of ability to make a nice one) and they were like 'yes this is what we want'. so yes! my virgin experience with the 哭腔 monster, you read.

And so yes, this ends my really random blog post about a demo recording on wednesday afternoon. But a learning experience because this above 4 points have motivated me to get VOICE LESSONS! hahahaha. and hopefully my vocal deficiencies can be salvaged, if its not too late.