September Craziness and October Miracles
Hello once again everyone to my blog! Today's blog is about the unexpected struggles I had in September and October to get my videos put together. My struggles started in the very first week of September when I got sick with a cold. I had lost my voice! How was I supposed to record any of my songs without a good singing voice? I tried to think of ideas on what to do if I was still sick at the end of the month. In the meantime, I could at least work on my monthly blogs. I had also come up with an idea to do a cover for a couple Mary Poppins songs and spent some of my time coming up with ideas on how to put the song together.
While I was writing my blogs, I remembered that in September there was an annual concert in the park performed by the university's Symphony Orchestra. Every year they ended the concert with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and had fireworks going to replace the cannons he had written in for the piece. I figured that if I attended that and filmed their performance, it could be my September video and I wouldn't have to record myself. In my excitement and anticipation for the concert, I decided to write about the 1812 Overture for my last blog of the month. The Symphony's performance ended up being a pretty good video, and I was excited to upload it by the end of the month. However, technology decided to make my YouTube life as difficult as possible.
Even though it was a good recording, it was too big. It showed up on the photos app on my phone, but I couldn't find it when logging into the same account on my computer. Ever since I started doing YouTube videos, I had recorded videos on my phone and then downloaded them onto my laptop through my Gmail photos account. What was I going to do now??
Then I remembered that in the Fall semester of 2020 I had decided to find out the actual Solfege (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do) of the song "Doe a Deer" from The Sound of Music. I already had the Solfege prepared, and thankfully my voice was doing better. To save time, I decided to just drum my hands against a flat surface for accompaniment. I also realized that even though I didn't have enough room on my phone for a video, I had the option of just taking the pictures of the hand signs for Solfege. I was right that pictures would be better, and I was able to download them onto my computer! However, it took me a lot more time to edit and match the pictures with the vocals. To make matters worse, my computer suddenly shut down on me! This was the last day of September!!! I am so, so, so grateful that I have a neighbor who understands computers. She helped me get my computer started back up with enough time for me to finish editing and upload the video. Here's the link to that video. I hope you enjoy watching it more than I did editing it.
There were a few good things that came from these struggles. Not having enough room on my phone for videos gave me the desire to order a camera on Amazon with a screen that flipped around. I could still see what was being filmed, just like when I had filmed with my phone's camera. But now I didn't have to worry about my phone running out of any more space. While I was at it, I ordered a microphone as well. It gives me the option to choose how much volume or echo I want to have.
Now onto the struggles of October. As I already mentioned, I had come up with a Mary Poppins Cover while I was sick. This included two vocal parts and Cello accompaniment. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the month I found it difficult to move my right hand. I found out that I had jammed my finger. I'm pretty sure that it had something to do with the way I was drumming my hands for the September video. Once again, I had a setback at the beginning of the month. I couldn't play my Cello with only my left hand! Thankfully, I was given the advice to exercise my hand by squeezing a stress ball and it healed pretty quickly. But I was worried that if I immediately started playing Cello, my hand would be filled with pain again.
I finally got the courage to play my Cello on the last Monday of the month. Once again, everything was last second! But then something AMAZING happened. On that Monday, I got all the audio recordings I needed. On Tuesday, I recorded all of my videos. On Wednesday, I edited the video and uploaded it onto YouTube, scheduling it to come out on Saturday evening. It was a Halloween miracle! (Get it? Usually people say "Christmas miracle", but it was October!) By the way, in case you were wondering when you read last month's blog about Halloween costumes, I was Mary Poppins for Halloween this year. I figured I might as well hit two birds with one stone.
If you haven't already done so, click the links previously mentioned in this blog. I invite you to also check out my videos, sheet music, and please donate to my website. Comment down below on how you deal with technical difficulties.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end!
