The past few weeks have been interesting. Crazy but, intersting.


I was in the school band in 5th grade. Drums. Got kicked out when I accidently tore a kids shirt off trying to remove a loose thread. I have developed a monster respect for that poor teacher. This stuff is a lot harder than the pros make it look.


We've had two practices since the last post. Mad fun and getting better every time. It has been a bit difficult getting 6 people to a regular practice. Work trips, visitation schedules and family vacations can toss a kink into the plans but that's life. This is fun! We have yet to have all the members together.


So we can play. It sounds very good. Then there's the singing part. Singing's hard. Singing good is really hard. I'm, by default, the singer. Yikes!


Wikipedia has been a great help. So has my wife (and keyboard player). It's easy to sound ok when you crank the volumn up on the radio. Cranking the volumn on a PA system is a whole new adventure. My first attempts added up to 650 WATTS of pure s**t.


There are a lot of reasons that singing is hard. Not knowing the words to a song is probably the first and biggest road block to singing it... Those parts we mumble with the radio really sound freaky live. I've gotten better at memorizing all of the lyrics to the songs we're playing. I still have a lot of work to do. And I'm really good and mixing up the order of the verses. So good, in fact, it might be considered a strength if it weren't for the melody going in a different direction. I'm trying to steer the music selections to songs with very few lyrics.


We're playing a lot of Pink Floyd tunes. Most of Dark Side of the Moon, Comfortably Numb, Wish You Were Here. Got some Joe Walsh, Stevie Ray, Santana, Doobie Brothers and Buffalo Springfield in the mix as well. We'll certainly add more.


Some of these I've been singing along with for 40 years. Rocky Mountain Way is in the key of B. High B. Joe's high B. I couldn't hit that if a snow storm blew up my shorts. It's now a middle B. Nice and comfortable. Hopefully the audience will appreciate the fact that I'm making it easier on all of us.


An epiphany was handed to me by my lovely wife. "You have to make the words your own". I made an AC/DC song my own once by singing "Dirty Deeds And Dah Dunder Chief". She didn't mean that way.


I'd been struggling with the opening lyric of Breathe. Just finding the opening note was tough. The second line, "Breathe in the air", was a joke. Have you ever heard someone who's lived in Texas for quite a while say air?  Gilmore makes it breathe. I made it sound like air'r'r'r. Mortified.


So, in a sense, I made the words my own. I spoke them. into a recorder. I've never said air'r'r'r in my life until I tried singing that line. It wasn't there when I spoke. So I spoke and spoke and spoke. The recorder patiently proved my ineptitude repeatedly. Until I used my own voice and my own pace. Comfort settled in and it improved.


Wiki has several pages on singing. Exercises for loosening up. Training your voice. Finding your key. Breathing. It's been a big help.


A long way to go and my r key is getting chapped.


More later.