April 11, 2005

During lunch today I decided to head home and play around with the music studio a little bit. I’m still getting to know my way around the equipment and over the next week or so I’m going to have a lot of reading to do, familiarizing myself with Garage Band and the various settings on my vocal processing equipment. It’s all very fun and exciting and a challenge that I’m eager to tackle.

So today I thought I’d break up the day and sing a little bit during my lunch break. I popped in an instrumental version of “Could It Be Magic” by Barry Manilow. I cranked up the mic, passed the vocals to my headphones, turned up the speakers and for the first time in a very long time, I sang in full voice, completely uninhibited. And in doing so, I broke a sweat while singing.

It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve been able to expend so much energy singing that I was able to get all hot and bothered doing so. The last time I sang on a mic was in 2000 when I sang the National Anthem for the local minor league hockey team. While I did sing full voice and with lots of conviction, I didn’t really break a sweat doing so. Not that I’m a calm, cool and collected performer. Quite the contrary. I get lots of butterflies in my stomach when I’m performing in front of others. But I usually have a very small touch of “timid” on the performance that keeps me from singing really hard.

Being in the comfort of our home and our studio, I was able to sing like I haven’t sung since my days at SUNY Fredonia.

So while I may being a bit more stinky at work this afternoon, at least I was able to break out of my shell and share a little music. Now if I could just get this stuff into the Mac Mini so I could share it! 🙂

Earl and I are winding down the weekend. He’s catching up with online buddies and I just finished mixing some dance tracks in my new music studio.

“That’s What Love Can Do”, Boy Krazy.

That’s right, the studio is up and functional. I took Thursday afternoon off to meet the guys from Lowe’s when they delivered the cabinets and countertop. When I got home, everything was sitting on the front porch without a delivery truck in sight. I guess they didn’t want their tip. It was a little disconcerting, because they said they would be here Thursday afternoon, and here it was 12:10. According to their mildly agitated note they were at the house around 10:00 a.m. I guess they didn’t teach the delivery department how to tell time. ‘Tis a pity, as Earl and I are famous big tippers.

Oh well. Thursday night we headed to Connecticut for the weekend, which I’ve mentioned before. We weren’t big winners Friday night at Foxwoods Casino but we did manage to make it out of there while breaking even, so we didn’t have any tears in our beer.

“Happy”, Legacy of Sound.

Saturday morning we decided to take a little road trip on our way home. If you’re looking at a map, we live about three hours northwest of Hartford, Conn. So of course we headed northeast and drove through Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont on the way home. We made a quick stop at Chick-Fil-A in Nashua, New Hampshire for lunch and then enjoyed the drive across the more scenic parts of New Hampshire and Vermont. We took a little hike at the Quechee Gorge and took a moment to breathe in some fresh air and just listen to the sounds of the evergreen forests. I find the evergreen forests so enchanting. The whispering of the wind through the pines, the blanket of needles on the ground. Very relaxing.

We then continued the trek home across Vermont, stopping for a bite to eat at one of our new haunts, the Circle Diner in Latham.

One of the reasons we took this little ride was to celebrate the 9th anniversary of our first date, where Earl and I took a ride up through Vermont just getting to know each other. It was great to relive the past and look ahead to the future.

“You Keep Me Hanging On (Dance Remix)”, Reba McEntire.

Today has been a productive today, putting together the sound studio and such. Tom has this urge to sit on the turntables and doesn’t really appreciate the scolding I’ve given him. I have a feeling that I’m going to find cat fur on them when I get home from work tomorrow, but we shall see. He likes the felt slip mats.

Having a recording studio like this has been a dream of mine for a long, long time. I’m so excited that’s it’s all coming together. I have one more piece of gadgetry to install so that I can record from my mixing board into my Mac Mini and then I’m good to go. Tonight I messed around with Garage Band a bit and played some ditties on my MIDI keyboard. Very cool! I’ll have to share some creations here once I get confident with what I’m doing.