OMG! That is too funny. I might have to try that next year.

Is that what he was supposed to be? A "Squirrely wrath"? I thought he was her cat. Doesnt really matter. That was the perfect conglomeration of all of the people that start in.

I guess it's a series and he is Foamy the Squirrel. My friend just left the clip on my myspace page....I had never seen it before. I thought it was very timely for us.

Oh I heard it right at the end. Squirrelly wrath.

I uploaded the wrong file.

That was a computer generated version of the background music. I was originally going to sing over that, but it was too 'rigid'.

So I decided to actually play the music myself despite my limited musical abilities.

Anyway I uploaded the "live performance" complete with the voice this time.

It's pretty bad.

But it might be better than 2 minutes of boring computer generated background music.

Try it again.

Hopefully you'll get the right file this time.

http://www.csonline.net/designer/abra/goddess.htm

Yay, that's much better, though I have the feeling, by listening to it, that you are pressing your voice instead of letting it flow freely.
Let go of the fear that you can't sing, because you can.

I can't do anything fluently.

Music has never been something that moves me. I don't know why.

I think it's because I've lived my entire life in my left brain. Seriously, I've been so deep into mathematics and physics and other pursuits of 'logic' I've used the left side of my brain almost exclusively my entire life.

Now I'm trying to activate the right side of my brain but it's like trying to teach an old god new tricks.

In fact, this is what made me get into hand drumming in the first place. Amazingly I am improving. When I first got them I couldn't keep a beat to save my soul. Now at least I'm doing things that resemble a beat.



I'm also going through this art course "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain".

Between meditations, shamanic journeying, hand-drumming, and singing I might be able to access the right side of my brain.

This is like trying to wake up a sleeping dragon.

I'd rather you wake up this sleeping voice of yours, it's fabulous when not pressed. Just let go for once, and give your all, not only half of it.

Thank you for the encouragement.

Part of the reason here is that I don't even have a rock solid melody for this piece so I'm just singing it off the cuff, and in some places I go up when I should go down, etc.

So I'm still working out the "Tune".

Near the end I got entirely off key altogether and just kind of faked it to get to the ending "Namastes".

I only just wrote this music. So part of it is that I'm just not familar with it yet.

Gimmie six moons to practice it.

Tune in again next solstice.

Sorry, my patience level is on nill, I want it now.

Go somewhere and meditate.

Desires for instant gratification will get you nowhere.

If I could be a great performer overnight I'd be more than happy to ablige.

If I become a good performer in 6 moons owl be tickled pink.

This was my first attempt at recording this song. And I'm doing it in three parts, drums, guilar, vocals.

I'm trying to improve all three.

But seriously it would be a lot easier if I could spilt up into three seperate bodies and we could all play our parts simultaneously. That would be a lot of fun!

I actually do know a hand drummer who can play the drums really well.

I guess owl need to put together a group. But how many people are going to want to sing Mood Goddess songs?

I have the God Song to do yet too. I haven't even come up with the music for that one yet.

If life was that simple, that's what I'd do, but life is not a dress rehearsal, so I've to take what it gives me.

You're a pragmatic little witch, and even though you're Invisible your stunning pragmatism shines through like the fiery flames of a blazing cauldron burning with unrequited desire.

You're a little Celtic Witch
who can't suppress your itch
To satisfy your battle cry
that I should fill your niche

All you do is bìtch
that I sing a bit off pitch
and so you vow, you want it now
a song without a glitch

Wow. you are very talented, James.

Thank you Ruth.

I'm working at becoming talented.

What I've learned is that we are all talented. We can all do whatever we want.

All we need to do is 'let go' just like the Invisible Celtic Witch suggests.

I don't know much about music but I love songs in minor key.

Talent has nothing to do with it, it takes desire and lots of practice.

The difference between a talented person and one who is not is that the one who is not tried it once and then lost interest and quit.

Now there are those who are gifted. My sister Karen loves music and would like to have been a singer really bad, but she is tone deaf and has no timing or rhythm. She could practice her entire life and never get any good at singing or playing the piano. She took organ lessons for two years and after all her lessons she sounded the same playing a tune as she did after one week. No progress at all. Its unbelievable.

I tried to teach a guy to paint once. He wanted to paint so much. But after a few lessons I gave up on him. His idea of a scenery picture was an upside down W painted brown (as mountains) and a blue sky with two cotton balls as clouds.)

But he never gave up. He found other teachers and he may have eventually learned to paint. He showed me a very nice picture, but I suspect his teacher actually did most of it.

Some people might be "talented" or "gifted" but a lot of people just practice a lot.

Dean Martin... that's talented. He never went to rehearsal. He seemed to sing so naturally, without a care in the world.

Good point. The same goes for practicing witchcraft as well.

I can certainly identify with that.

I did the same thing with the piano. I learned quite a bit and progressed quite a bit in the early going. Naturally I was starting from scratch so there was a lot of room for improvement in the early going.

However, I got to a brick wall that I could never get past.

For the next two years all I did was enlarge my repertoire of very poorly played pieces. I kept plugging along figuring that at some point I would 'break free' and start playing well, and then my entire repetoire would instantly improve in quality.

Unfortunately that never happened. I started to realize that even after two years I was no better than I was after the first month of playing. All I had done was added more poorly-played pieces to my list.

And I tired every trick in the book to improve my playing. I finally just concluded that my hands are never going to do what I want them to do.

I mean, I could already 'feel' the limitation in my hands. I knew precisely how I wanted simple phrases to sound, but I was unable to make my hand play them the way I wanted them to sound. So it was clearly a physical limitation. For some reason I just can't control my fingers to the degree than is necessary to make the music flow the way I want it.

I finally had to confess that I can't play the piano.

Here's a short excerpt of me playing Debussy's Clair de Lune.

http://www.csonline.net/designer/ideas/clair.htm

I did manage to get this down pretty well, the only problem is that I couldn't learn the next section at all. It was just way beyond my ability to play even remotely close to how it's supposed to sound. And that was after two years of practicing it!

I had no choice but to give up.

My hands just won't do it. They just don't work well enough. It's like there's a motor dysfunction or something when I reach a certain point of complexity and speed.

That sounds okay to me James but the piano is funny? Like its out of tune maybe? You also sound as if you are guessing at what the tempo should be. Do you have a metronome? That might help you. I dont know anything about music at all but I know metronomes can certainly help people achieve a better sense of time. Right now it sounds as if you are playing what you have heard before which is not right.

Yes, the piano was out of tune. It's an old upright. I tune it myself, but it slips out of tune very quickly.

It wasn't in the best tuning when I recorded that.

I also hadn't played that piece in quite a while at the time I recorded it, so there were some slight hesitations in it when I was trying to remember how it went.

I haven't played the piano in over a year now. Partly because it's out of tune again, and partly because I've truly just given up on it.

I've been warned by musicians to never touch another musical instrument again in as long as I live just as a courtesy to the human race.

So I try to keep to myself when I play, but then I started posting stuff on the Internet.

I should go back to being a scientist I spose. That's my true calling.