Talent... Who Needs It?

I've always been of the opinion that if I'm forced to choose between a talented person vs. somebody who will work their tail off I'll pick the guy who works his tail off. Turns out I'm right. Here's an article that claims to have figured out where talent really comes from, and the big suprise is...

Talent comes from practice.

http://www.freakonomics.com/times0507col.html?_r=1&oref=slogin%20

The two important elements of practice are:
1. Immediate feedback.
2. Goal setting.

Just repeating something over and over again is not enough. So for our purposes, just repeating the same song over and over doesn't make you better at singing it. You need to be focused on some aspect of the song and working to improve it, like pitch accuracy while staying relaxed, for example, and then you need some way of getting feedback, like recording yourself singing the phrase and then comparing it to a pitch refererence, or getting someone to listen to you and getting their frank and honest opinion.

It's kind of cool to know that you can be as good at anything as you are willing to practice consistently and effectively, isn't it?

Mountain State Critique

Since I did a Turkey Creek critique...

So the same issue that occured in the HS Turkey Creek performance happened at the MSC graduation. Take us out of our comfort zone and we get really stiff and uncomfortable. What's the big deal? Yes, I was a dork singing to that lady, but I was raging against the fact that we were holding back so much. I decided to be a dork on purpose to fight back. Too little, too late. We should try to get in the habit of getting 'psyched up' for these atypical shows that tend to throw us for a loop. Any ideas?

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted here. I'm going to make an effort to get back into this.

Here is a short article I found on fixing the irritating habits we have when speaking...

http://www.mtannoyances.com/?p=417

This is some good advice for improving our intros. But it also points out an idea that I've always thought was interesting.

When I'm performing, I have the same "split consciousness" thing going on that is described. On the one hand I'm highly focused on the song, pitch, tempo, words. But another part of me is standing outside the performance, watching me, the audience, the sound system, you guys. I read a book called "A Soprano on Her Head" when I was in college. Totally gay title, but it was talking about performance psychology, and it had this idea that you have two people in your head, the artist and the judge. The artist is the creative, emotional part of your consciousness. This is the part that improvises melodies, interprets lyrics, etc. The judge is the critical part, that notices the flat or sharp notes, missed words, all that. The judge is helpful when you're rehearsing, but when you're performing, you need to muzzle the judge so that the artist is free to make the magic happen. More thoughts on this later...