Brian in Melbourne

My knee-jerk reaction to any problem requiring solving - waste time web browsing. If I can just replace that reaction with actually solving the problem I'll be ten times more efficient.

There is only one way I can "be". Whenever I interact with someone I am either sociable or not sociable. The difficulty is that when I pick and choose who I want to be sociable with then I run the risk of becoming not sociable. Then when I do want to socialize I can find that I stay not sociable even when I want to be.

Today I was too scared - too scared to look at how much time I am not spending on work. Too scared to talk to the mums after school to talk about childcare exchange. Too scared to say that not everything is ok with how I am acting and that something needs to change.

As for what the solution is, I hope that will become clear in time.

Edit: In fact, the act of writing this has already made some things clear.

I have a bad habit of pushing the back of my tongue down in order to transition from chest voice. I've had it for so long that it feels "normal". But it interferes with my singing in many ways - it gets me out of chest voice too early, and it makes it impossible to get a natural sounding mix or head voice.

So last lesson my teacher was working on this. He also worked on my jaw as well, but it wasn't until recently that I realized why. It turns out that when I lift my tongue out of my throat and stop pressing down with it, I have a tendency to lock my jaw forward. And when I make my jaw go back down, I have a tendency to push my tongue down as well. So both of these must be worked on together.

After this realization, I started keeping my tongue out of the way, but [b]only[/b] just enough. Not so much that my jaw started coming up. And with my jaw, I let it sit down and back a little, but didn't try to push it down, which would have my tongue push down. And finally I found it, a free and powerful mixed voice!

The real test is if I can find it tomorrow.. I will be very happy if I can!

The requirements:
- Jaw must be relaxed, and must move down a little as the resonance moves up (for me this starts around Bb below middle C).
- Tongue must not interfere. It must stay in the same place

And how to fulfil these:
- For the jaw, move it around a bit while singing scales. Let it drop a bit as you sing upwards. Not too far, just enough that the resonance stays strong without needing the tongue or outer larynx muscles to "help".
- For the tongue, I picture my voice as staying in the same place. When my tongue pushes down, I can feel some kind of movement in my voice. To stop it from doing this, I picture it as not making that move.

The exercises: "gee" and "nay". "Gee" is great for connecting, and "nay" helps with finding the right spot for the resonance change. I've noticed that after "gee" is working properly, I can jump straight into "mum" and it also works.

Edit: My jaw may need to drop as early as Ab below middle C actually, to maintain total freedom. More investigation is needed.

We've been house hunting for a while now, our intention being to take advantage of the $26k grants and stamp duty savings for building a new home. So I've decided to archive a bit of our hunting here.

We have now decided on Metricon as the builder. We had been choosing between the Newhaven 33 and the Riva 33 but have settled on the Riva for 2 reasons - It's cheaper up front (by $18k) and it needs a smaller block, further reducing land costs. The total savings come to something like $30k for the Riva over the Newhaven.

We are now in the final stages of choosing land, focusing on stage 12 of Renaissance Rise. Once we've chosen the land we can be a bit more relaxed about choosing the house. The difficulty of course is that the land must suit the house, but having chosen the house we are in a position to choose land that suits.

Finally we can relax! At least after we've sorted the land ..

I stumbled upon this very useful site today. It has a great collection of music flash cards, which are exactly what I was looking for. They're good enough to have their own journal entry I think.