More singing stuff.

[solarbird]

Singing lessons today. Kathryn's teaching me. ^_^ (She teaches me to sing, I do minor house repair. Today: the track lighting and the bathroom fan. Previously: the toilet.) I sang A-flat-over-high-C. (um. Instrumental high C, which is one octive above middle C. Apparently, vocalists call TWO octives above middle C "high C" and the one in between just "C." That's a whole step higher than I've ever sung before _at all_, which is very cool. I'm only on my third lesson and I'm gaining range pretty rapidly; Kathryn thinks I've got the voice to be a pretty good high alto, too. So that's all good. ^_^

And that's only a few days after overdoing it on Sunday with General Taylor in G. So being good paid off. Yay me. ^_^

Comments

[wrog]

 Instrumental high C, which is one octave above middle C.

I've heard trumpet players use "high C" to refer to the C above the (treble-clef) staff (since the "high C" that's on the staff is no big deal --- and I'm guessing likewise for (soprano) singers). Then again, most of the trumpet players I knew were Maynard Ferguson fans, so my sample may well be skewed.

But I would guess that, in general, while "middle C" is well-defined, at least in notation if not in actual pitch, people tend to use "high" and "low" much more loosely and usually with respect to the customary range of the instrument in question.

Actually what's weird is that since many intruments are transposed so as to make the usual range lie on the staff --- nobody likes reading/writing ledger lines, after all --- "middle C" tends to be the lowest C that one can reasonably play (at least for treble-clef-denoted instruments ... like bass clarinet, where "middle" C is way the fuck down there, pitchwise).

Granted, my experience in this is somewhat screwed up since, having been a French horn player with a sense of absolute pitch, i.e., dealing with parts that were transposed in F, but always thinking in terms of concert pitch, I got quite adept at completely ignoring what names people used to refer to notes since it was rarely useful for me (e.g., they'd call something "Bb", but it was really was an Eb and my mental hashtable is keyed on sounds rather than names anyway) and I nearly always knew from context what note they were talking about.