Performance Diary

Yesterday the Art Center in Orange had an open house and I did some Christmas music from 10:00 a.m. until noon. In this photo a couple of friends are singing along. 

Since it was just me without any other instruments, was able to use the old nylon acoustic guitar and go back and forth between fingerpicking and strumming with my thumb instead of a flat pick to get a nice warm sound.

The Importance of Tone

I often compare tone of voice to the quality of tone made by music makers with their instrument. The most frequent example of this is to say to a student, "Have you ever had the experience of talking with someone, or listening to a teacher in the classroom, and realizing they have wonderful things to say, but that their tone of voice makes it hard to pay attention to them?" I've never had this point not understood. I then go on to say that if the tone they're creating with their instrument isn't appealing - no amount of work on articulation or dynamics is going to make a real difference in how their music is perceived. 

This article points out that the decision we make about how we feel about someone's voice tone happens in milliseconds, and there is great agreement among people on what the tone of voice can signal about the person.

. . . Although it's not clear how accurate such snap judgements are, what is apparent is that we all make them, and very quickly. "We were surprised by just how similar people's ratings were," says McAleer. Using a scale in which 0 represents no agreement on a perceived trait and 1 reflects complete agreement, all 10 traits scored on average 0.92 – meaning most people agreed very closely to what extent each voice represented each trait. . . 

 . . . The impression that our voices convey – even from an audio clip lasting just 390 milliseconds – appears to be down to several factors, for example, the pitch of a person's voice influenced how trustworthy they seemed. "A guy who raises his pitch becomes more trustworthy," says McAleer. "Whereas a girl who glides from a high to a low pitch is seen as more trustworthy than a girl whose voice goes up at the end of the word." . . .

What the researchers in this article are calling "tone" and what musicians call "tone" is not exactly the same, since the researchers are including pitch in their definition - but for me this is a very validating bit of research.

I've always been baffled by music educators talking so little about tone. In my years in the community band, except for one director saying "You can't be in tune without good tone", the only other mention of tone was that lame joke about someone having good tone on a note played at the wrong time - which was told over and over and over by multiple directors - and to me, after the umpteenth repetition, had the effect of mocking the concept of good tone. 

A Conversation with Renée Fleming

This is long, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Fleming talks very directly about being a singer, the work involved, the repertoire, technique vs. expression, other singers, and a few practical tips on how to use the body in singing.

Encumbrances Of Angels

My friend Janet, the wife of Dr. Andy, is a poet who publishes under the name J. M. R. Harrison. When I first read this poem of hers years ago I immediately thought it could be put to music.

Encumbrances Of Angels

With all eternity to ponder
the nature and cost of freedom,
even an angel might prefer
the rasp of sand between the toes
to the ethereal tug of cosmic tides,
choose the angularity of starfish
over the symmetry of stars,
desire---whatever the penalty---
the lash of wind-driven rain
on a back unburdened of wings.

http://www.lochravenreview.net/2009Fall/harrison.html

The first step, sometime back in the '90s, was to work out a melody over some guitar chords, with the only notation being the words with the guitar chords written in overtop. That's where things stood until a couple of years ago when we decided to actually notate the melody, add flute at Janet's request, and add standup bass as Dr. Andy was just starting to work with one, and turn the guitar chords into a keyboard accompaniment and adding an introduction.

We then got Nancy Lynn Marmorella, who had helped out on the Mantra Mountain CD, to make the trip down from Harpers Ferry to sing, and asked Hayley Parrish to play the flute part. We got together one afternoon, ran through it a few times, and then made this recording down in the living room. 

Moving Beyond Anecdotal

Anecdotally, a lot of people feel that making music has therapeutic benefits. This article talks about a new research project at UC San Francisco to see what empirical data there might be to support that idea. 

Over the next four years, a dozen choirs will be created at senior centers around San Francisco. . . . . The project will assess the impact on participants’ cognition, mobility and overall wellbeing during their choral year. The researchers also will examine whether singing in a community choir is a cost-effective way to promote health among culturally diverse older adults.

My interest in music therapy has always centered on the benefits of actually making it yourself as opposed to listening to it. All the neuroscience on how listening to it affects us is tremendously helpful, but in the long run, studies like this one, assuming good data is found, will be much more helpful when advocating for music making and music therapy.

Voice Diary

Here in the past 6 or 8 months my sense is that my singing has gotten a lot better. When I've sung around other people there have been a few spontaneous positive comments that suggest that what to me seems a tremendous shift is at least big enough others can hear some difference. Here are a few things I think are contributing to the improvement:

• I did not begin to sing until in my 20's when I began playing guitar, and my guitar playing was always stronger. What's dawned on me lately is that my guitar playing was leading my singing, rather than the other way around. Most conspicuously, I was laying into the down beat strum on the guitar to such an extent the syllable sung on those beats was getting covered up. Lately I've been just very lightly strumming on the downbeats and letting my voice learn how to lead. There's definitely some brain rewiring going on, because not paying attention means the old habit creeps back in.
• Listening back to recordings has made me cringingly aware of how my affectations were suffocating the poetry and music. I was so caught up in trying to convey how wonderfully artistic my stylings were, there was a lot more ego than artistry on display. Now I'm trying to just sing the song - letting all the consonants and vowels come alive and the phrases more naturally spring from the words, chords and rhythms.
• I've been giving songs I've sung for 40 years a rest and working up more new ones so as to stay out of the old ruts. Exploring new pieces makes it much easier to try new ways of singing.
• Back when Dietrich Fischer-Diekau passed away I clicked on a video of him singing and noticed that he sometimes tilted his head down and that made me realize I'd always assumed looking straight forward or tilting one's head up a bit was the best way to sing. Tilting it down a bit changes the way the sound feels in my head. There's the sense it's resonating more fully up there - and it also changes the musculature around the throat. Both those effects give me the sense of having more tools to work with to create a good sound.
• Brass players sometimes use the cliché, "let the air do the work", and that's sort of the feeling I have now when the singing is going well, that I'm not forcing or making it happen, but simply letting it happen. Rather concentrating on projecting sound, I'm more focused on singing expressively, syllable by syllable, phrase by phrase.
• Playing the horn has given me a much deeper nonverbal appreciation of phrasing and its connection to breathing. Just to play a phrase on the horn, you have to keep the energy level up throughout. For me it's harder to simply "phone in" notes on the horn as I sometimes feel I do with the flutes, and that in turn made me aware of how from time to time I've been just sketching in phrases with my voice, rather than giving full support to every syllable and pitch.
• For years and years my singing was either in day rooms in psych wards and nursing homes or leading music therapy groups in closed classrooms for emotionally disturbed children (and never with a mic). In both cases volume and projection were of paramount importance. Now I'm more often singing with pro level players and sometimes with a mic and it's a totally different environment and allows for a more nuanced approach.

Music(al) Stretches

Sound and time are the two primal ingredients of music, and a word we use for each is rooted in the act of physically stretching something. 

Tone comes from Middle English: from Old French ton, from Latin tonus, from Greek tonos 'tension, tone, from teinein 'to stretch" -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Pace comes from Middle English: from Old French pas, from Latin passus "stretch (of the leg)', from pandere "to stretch'. -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Stretching is something the human body does all the time, from waking in the morning to standing on tiptoes reaching for a top shelf, so we all have a built in somatic sense of some stretches being easy and others being extreme and everything in between. 

The most deep seated stretching we do is extending and relaxing the diaphragm with every breath. We do it one way when we're relaxed, and another when we're anxious. 

Since it's my contention that a lot of music's power to move us is due it its encoding physical gestures (and associated feelings), I feel the ways in which music can mimic physical stretches (and associated feelings) has a lot to do with the feelings a piece of music might evoke. It's so easy to get caught up in the surface issues of music making, we can sometimes forget there's this deeper gestural substrate that's communicating to an audience in a mostly non-conscious way.

A key component of physical stretches is that they always have an arc from not being stretched to being fully stretched and back again. You can't make yourself stop breathing and you can't hold a body stretch forever. So besides the degree of a stretch at it's fullest, from barely stretched to full or over extension, there's the way each stretch builds to a peak and then relaxes.

"Tension and release" is a phrase often used in talking about music, and for me, understanding that in the context just laid out gives it a richer meaning. 

"Balance" is another word often used in talking about music making, but I've never really liked it because I always get the extremely two dimensional image of scales tipping one way or another, whereas stretching is complex and our sense of it springs directly from our proprioception.

I often ask students if they've ever been around someone who has lots of interesting things to say, but whose voice is so off putting it's hard to pay full attention, -  that's the substrate I'm talking about. If their voice tone suggests either a string stretched to the breaking point or barely tuned up to pitch, and if the pacing is either to fast or too slow, the words they say will may not register as well as they might. 

On the other hand, if the gestural substrate of your music making matches up well with what you're trying to express, there's a much better chance of connecting with an audience.

A Fine Quodlibet

From Wikipedia - 

A quodlibet is a piece of music combining several different melodies, usually popular tunes, in counterpoint and often a light-hearted, humorous manner. The term is Latin, meaning "whatever" or literally, "what pleases." 

I first came across the word quodlibet when reading about the Bach family entertaining themselves. In the video below, Elaine Fine's daughter and son put one together. Just watching it brings a smile to my face. Along with everything else, hearing some nice guitar (dobro?) finger-picking takes me back to the 60's when I first learned guitar from friends and things like Peter, Paul & Mary songbooks with Travis picking notated in tablature.

Good Time Banjo & Thumb Piano

Parameters and Musicianship

The March 2012 Musician's Friend catalog carries an interview with Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and other groups. The interview doesn't seem to be online, so I'm going to type in a couple of things he says.

I've had the same rig since prior to Rage Against the Machine, with my band Lock Up. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. One of the things that has helped me creatively and helped my imagination is to have some things just carved in stone. . . There's a sense of comfort in not worrying about gear anymore, I'm going to worry about trying to get sounds and music out of the gear I already have.

This is very similar to something I said in a post about composing, i.e. set some parameters and then see what you can do within them. If everything you're doing is boundless, it's sort of like that thing that can happen to hikers lost in a wilderness when they can't see the sun due to cloud cover or tree canopy - they often just wonder in circles.

There's also the "if only I had a better instrument" syndrome. It's true that better instruments are more responsive, but it's also true that a fine musician can make an average instrument sound great. 

Later in the interview he says:

. . . Up until that point, I had wanted to sound like my favorite guitar players - that's what "good" guitar playing sounded like to me. Then came this revelation that good guitar playing is when you sound like yourself, and I really began to discover who I was as an artist, as a guitarist and a musician.

To me this is the true path of the music maker. You start because you hear things you like and try to do the same, but over time, working towards discovering what it means to "sound like you" is what keeps the practice of music making meaningful, rewarding and ever refreshing. 

It can take a while. I've been singing some Dylan songs for 40 years, and just in the past couple of years have begun to sing them in a voice that sounds more like mine. I think two of the things that helped me were: 1) recording myself much more and repeatedly noticing I didn't sound like I thought I did or how I wanted to, and 2) playing the horn has taught me a world of things I hadn't fully realized about breathing and phrasing and the importance of never letting the musical line just be there filling space as opposed to moving forward with purpose.

Voice Diary

One project I've had on the back burner for a couple of years is making a recording for friends of the the Dylan songs I've been singing for over 30 years. There have been several sessions with Dave the former Army Band drummer and Dr. Andy on bass, separately and together, to get a feel for how to do them with a small ensemble as opposed to just me and the guitar.

Here lately I've been doing some test recordings to figure out how to best use the audio equipment to get the best sound on the voice and guitar. Running the sound through the speakers and/or headphones has been a revelation. It's like holding a magnifying glass to both tone and articulation. In a purely acoustic environment the sound of your voice is a blend of bone conduction and what the room sends back, which has the effect of buffering and delaying it for the tiniest bit of time.

Using a nice condenser mic no more that a foot away from the mouth and having that feeding headphones gives the voice a temporal immediacy and a clinical clarity. Small details I never noticed loom large. (Dr. Andy says it's the same for him using headphones with both the cello and the bass.)

One thing that's become particularly apparent is my not articulating clearly throughout a song. Just because I know the words as well as I do from memory doesn't mean someone listening will.

Something else is that the tone of my voice doesn't always sound like I'd imagined it does on some of the songs, and isn't conveying the sense and mood of the song as I intend.

All of which is to say recording yourself is a wonderful aid to learning to make music, and that using headphones while making the music amps up the experience.

One small audio procedure that seems to work well setting volume levels at that sweet spot that's at a high level comfortably short of feedback shriek is paying attention to the EQ settings. With my Mackie mixer there are knobs for high, mid and low EQ and I've been turning up the volume enough to hear a little room noise through the speakers, then dialing back any EQ that creates any sort of hum or white noise, and then turning up the gain. It's dawned on me that feedback shrieks are as much a creature of poor EQ settings as they are of too much volume.

Performance Diary

Yesterday we performed at the large Presbyterian Church in the town of Orange and last week we performed at the small Macedonia Christian Church down in what my father used to refer to as  "the lower part of the county" (it's more coastal plain than piedmont). I don't think we've ever sounded better than the audio at the link for Macedonia from two years ago as it was one of those times when everything sort of magically gelled. These two recent performances were very good, though, and I want to note what went well.

At Macedonia the minister, one of our tuba players, made our music the central feature of the service. We led the singing of the hymns as well as performed some tunes on our own. Crawford specializes in short sermons and services, and in a service of less than 60 minutes, we played for 35 minutes.

Crawford says it's the best he's ever heard that congregation sing, and that was my feeling as well. I've pitched most of the hymns a step or three lower than the hymnals, so they were more in the range of regular people. I led the singing with my voice and the guitar and the players did a marvelous job of supporting the singing, with a different instrument taking the lead for the singing of each verse. On hymns of three verses we added two instrumental iterations between the sung verses and built the mood.

I'd done up a keyboard album of the transposed hymns for the organist and having her play mostly the bass and harmony lines was a real treat, filling out the sound. From past experience I knew that when I faced the congregation, she and the other players can't hear the guitar, so I took an amp and put it back next to them with just enough volume for them to hear it but that I couldn't detect. That worked very well. 

We've slowly been working up an improvisatory Dixieland version of The Church in the Wildwood, which is sort of a theme song for that particular church, and that went down very well.

At the Presbyterian Church yesterday we just did music before and after the service with a couple of mostly instrumental hymns during the service. Crawford was still preaching down at Macedonia, so we were down to one tuba, and Bill B our sax player didn't make it due to a freak car/power line pole accident near his house preventing him for getting out.

Before everyone else got there I set up our equipment and sang that long song of Dylan's, Boots of Spanish Leather, from up in the choir loft where we were going to perform. It takes me high and low in my range and is a great workout, both for my voice and for testing acoustics. I figured out the best ways to aim my voice into the wonderful acoustic space, and how much to project it to get just the right amount of reverb.

Once everyone else got there we played right up until the service as people gathered below. At one point we got a nice round of applause (after Just a Closer Walk with Thee) and during the "joys and sorrows" portion of the service one of the members said how wonderful it was to walk into the church with everyone smiling and the music coming down from upstairs.

One thing I've never had happen before is that while I was singing the one verse of Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior I did between instrumental iterations, my ears popped twice in that pressure adjusting way they can. The hurricane had passed during the night, so I don't think it was a big pressure change in the environment. I think it was just that I was opening my jaw in that "yawning" way voice teachers talk about and it allowed things to equalize, which in the normal course of things wouldn't have needed to.

Performance Diary

Back on Saturday 7/2 the Orange Community Band played in a band festival in the pavilion down at the end of the pedestrian mall (formerly Main Street) in Charlottesville, VA. The pavilion is the major outdoor big time venue in Charlottesville and it was a real treat to play in such a well designed, top of the line venue. Ample room on stage and very nice acoustics. The band played well and the audience very receptive.

Then on Sunday 7/3 there was the Picnic in the Park here in Orange out behind the airport. My group opened up with a Dixieland jazz set of about 40 minutes, then the community band played for about 45, then there was a short ceremony (which included my singing the national anthem with the banjo, a tenor sax and an Eb tuba), then a mother and daughters singing group, then my group started with some Americana until the storm came.

For the Dixieland I used a clip-on dynamic mic on the banjo because the sound is so directional. Putting it through the sound system meant everyone could hear it no matter where I was facing.

Also used mics on the tuba, harmonica and the clarinet, all run through the Mackie mixer and out to the two large Peavey keyboard amps, with the control room feed going to a small keyboard amp for our monitor. Then ran a line from the out of the most distant amp to a powered mixer and two speakers set up even further away. We had nice sound coverage throughout the area without it being too loud up front.

The community band apparently played very well. The director and the music educators in the group all talked about how "musically" we played. Here's an excerpt from the director's note to us afterwards:

. . . but once the music 'gets in your blood' it more-or-less begins to take on a life of its own. At that point the conductor becomes far less important as the engine drives itself from within the ensemble. We have to remember, though, that this occurs only when the notes and rhythms are learned and we are no longer bound to the printed page. That's when real music begins...and that's exactly what happened on Sunday night, in particular.

My problem was, as it has been in the past at these events, trying to change mental gears from banjo to horn. With the banjo I just play without thinking, but with the horn it is only with full concentration that I can manage to not embarrass myself. So for the first several numbers my memory is more what I was up to more than how the group sounded.

The Kenwood Players last set started, and then the storm came. Torrential rain and lots of close lightning. We were all safe under the large shelter, but I had to kill the sound system because of blowing rain. Until it was announced that the fireworks were canceled, it was me on banjo, a trumpet, sax, clarinet and tuba in acoustic mode. 

My singing was semi-hollerin', but people liked it and we kept everyone occupied during the storm. (Nearer My God to Thee was mentioned several times ;-) Orange being the small town it is, have had several people come up to say they really appreciated our persevering in the face of the storm.

One thing about my singing voice I keep meaning to mention is that I live on a dairy farm and most days spend most of an hour getting cows up out of the field and into the barn. Yelling is involved, but over the years I've worked on being loud and projecting without straining my voice. We're in the piedmont, so there are hills and vales offering great acoustics for testing uses of the voice.

Recording Yourself

Listening to recordings of yourself making music is probably the single most effective thing you can do to improve your playing. 

The key aspect of mindfulness is experiencing things as they are - not as we want them to be, as we're afraid they might be, as we feel/hope others might be experiencing them, or any of a myriad other distortions our untrained minds can inject into the experience. When we are actually in the process of playing music, there's so much going on in our minds, especially for amateurs, that's it's quite difficult to hear the music as it is.

Listening to a recording is a totally different experience. All the mental/emotional gymnastics have faded and we're left with just the sound of the music as we made it. There's no middle man/teacher trying to explain what it is we're doing, we can hear it ourselves. There's no need to reduce the experience to verbal language, as we can simply hear and react to the music non-verbally as an audience might.

I record all the performances of my group and give CDs to all the players. I and the amateurs of the group have all benefited wonderfully from this. I don't need to tell them what I hear they need to do to improve as they hear it themselves, and the same goes for me. 

As a single example, listening to recordings tipped me off to my sometimes more speaking than singing bits and pieces of lyrics instead of singing every syllable of the song. This probably goes back 40 years to my first trying to learn songs by speaking the words in rhythm while strumming the guitar as a preliminary to actually singing the song. Until I started doing all the recording here a few years ago, I was completely unaware of this and would have been dubious of anyone telling me it was the case. Hearing it in the recordings, though, cut right to the root of the problem and has given me much better traction improving as a singer.

Just as cultivating mindfulness of our behaviors in retrospect can lead to more clearly perceiving them in real time, listening to recordings of our playing can help us more accurately hear ourselves in real time and make improvements on the fly, just as high level players do. I used to be astounded by the real time listening skills of band directors, thinking I could never do that as for me it would be a sensory overload. While I'm nowhere near that level, I can now hear better in real time how my group is playing and make adjustments accordingly.

Performance Diary

Here in the past month or so our group, with varying personnel, has performed for:

A volunteer appreciation luncheon at a local nursing home - 

An outdoor butterfly release benefit for Hospice of the Rapidan -

An outdoor rehearsal dinner -

An outdoor fundraiser for UVa Children's Hospital - 

A fundraiser for a community 4th of July event - 

A dinner given to Wounded Warriors on a stop between their biking from DC to Richmond.

For all these events we were background entertainment during various social and dining activities. One of the things I've learned is that if we get the volume just right, some people can talk and visit while those right next to them can pay attention to us and clap and sing along if they like. It's really more like a music therapist running a group activity than a straight up performance.

The key element to success at all these events was reading the mood of the crowd and choosing tunes and ways of playing them which added to the convivial atmospheres. I did OK with that, but always afterwards thought of ways we could have done better. I'm still a bit unused to performing with a group of talented musicians and tend to get caught up in performing and not paying full attention to the crowd and thinking through what would be the most effective music to play. When it's just me and the guitar I can watch the audience the whole time, with other performers I need to stay connected with them as well, and it's hard for me to do both.

At the Wounded Warriors event yesterday, even though I knew ahead of time it was well over 100 veterans, many with prostheses, who had biked from Washington DC to Fredericksburg on a hot day and were headed to Richmond today, their energy level from being so physically active caught me off guard. We started out with some upbeat songs, and I should have stuck with that. My usual tack of slowing things down a bit after some fast ones didn't work particularly well. Those guys were pumped up, full of camaraderie, and enjoying a meal provided by the American Legion and the slow tune just didn't connect.

If I could somehow maintain better mindfulness, as the Buddhist call it, the performances could be better tweaked moment to moment to be more fully responsive to the audience. 

The other thing I noticed was that the high energy of the Wounded Warriors got me to singing with more intensity than I can ever recall in a performance. Part of it was the moving Memorial Day performance by the community band the day before building the mood. But I think most of it was their ruddy complexions, boisterous talk and laughter and the full attention some were paying me as a singer. Haven't listened to the recording yet, so don't know how it sounded, but it felt as though I was making some sort of breakthrough in projecting my emotions via my singing voice. It felt as though my voice was complete with nothing hindering its flow.

Horn Diary

I'm having the opportunity to play horn for a performance of the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday. We have two violins, two violas, a cello, a string bass and an organ, and, of course, the chorus. The harmonies are wonderful and the writing for the horn brings out the qualities I most love about it.

What I've come to realize is that one reason I so loved playing in the cantata at Christmas was playing horn with voices. Somehow, for me, playing with the chorus feels much more natural than playing in the community band. Maybe it's because I've sung so much and that part of the wonder of the horn is that it's so like the voice. Whatever the reason, blending the sound of the horn with the sound of the chorus is one of the most exhilarating musical experiences I've ever had.

Listening to Singers

Over the past few months I've had several conversations with different people talking about general ways to improve instrumental technique and expression. I've mentioned seeing in a number of books written by the highest level players the advice to listen to singers, as what you're trying to do with your instrument (I guess with the exception of percussion) is to bring to it the unmatched expressive power of the human voice.

Just wanted to make a brief post on this because that info was new to some people, but since I've seen it so many times over the years, thought everyone was aware of it.

Gesualdo

Some time ago Alex Ross seemed to abandon his The Rest Is Noise blog for a newer one and just today I discovered he'd gone back to it. Going through all the old posts this video turned up. I'm not sure there's any music I love more than Italian madrigals. Watching the singers let the music inhabit them as they inhabit the music is a treat. The main thing, though, is hearing all those wonderful untempered harmonies delivered by that most human of all the instruments, the voice.

YouTube has changed the embed code procedure and for whatever reason the right side of the video is not showing up when I publish the post (there are five singers). Follow this link to see it on YouTube

Juan Diego Flórez on Voice

Opera Chic just scored a major interview with Juan Diego Flórez (a major league operatic tenor) and this bit jumped out at me. He's talking about his manager, whose help managing his voice (which roles he should sing) is far more important than managing opera performance dates.

Ernesto has been valuable because he’s someone with a good pair of ears, and someone with a good pair of ears hears you much better than you’re able to hear yourself. Of course, it’s hard to understand yourself how your voice is perceived. For singers, we have an ear that hears ourselves outside and inside. For instance, when you have a cold and your ears are blocked, you hear yourself more on the inside. So it’s a constant balance of the ear’s inner and outer parts, and singers tend to think of their voices in a different way. So it’s good to have somebody who you can trust and who understands your voice. I think now, I have a very good idea of how I sound and what my voice is like and this is a very good thing.

Narrowing the gap between how you think you sound and how others perceive your sound is a vital part of making a healthy connection with an audience as a performer.

Voice Diary

I record most of the performances of the Kenwood Players and then make a CD for each player. That means listening closely all the way through twice, always noticing things that weren't as evident to me in the real time of the performance. The recording of the last week's performance is the first time I didn't physically cringe at least once listening to my voice. One of the most amazing things to me about the Kenwood Players is that I've ended up being a vocalist they feel is good enough to perform with in public.

I never sang as a child through high school, and when taking up the guitar in college it was transferring my piano finger skills to finger picking that occupied me the most. Any singing was just humming the melody enough to hear where the chord changes were. 

A couple of years after college I spent some months backpacking, traveling with guitar, through southern South America with a friend fluent in Spanish, sticking to the back roads. Chile was where we started out, and the first time I ever sang in public was around a small bonfire outside a small village on the coast. I remember doing Dylan's "Hard Rain". Jim asked one of the villagers what he thought and the reply was "se pasa" (it passes). 

What has always made my singing cringe worthy to me (and family and friends who have known me mostly as a non-singer) has been the weirdly inauthentic moments when the emoting overpowers the technique and the psychodrama implodes the music.

In this latest recording there are lots of errors of intonation and rhythm, but none made me cringe. I hope that's because I'm finally able, after nearly 40 years of trying, to have the singing be inflected by the emotions rather than visa versa. But then again, it could just be my ear has become numb to my neuroses.

Then there's the whole issue of two very close friends I got to know after I began to sing, both of whom much prefer what they call my "old voice" of before my working on it so much here the past ten years or so. 

photo - bull frog with the old hay barn in the background