Blog. I commit unto thee my recording of O come, O come Emmanuel, one of my favourite haunting churchy tunes, in an effort to get with the festive spirit. Continuing on with my weekly singing lesson homework, I transferred a lovely soundtrack for this carol to Audacity, only to find that the track weirdly lost a lot of its loveliness in the transference. Audacity allows me to change a backing track’s key and I desperately wanted to lower this one as my aged voice couldn’t cope with the top notes (this carol should really be sung by a lovely young chorister, or just anybody young.) But, on lowering the key the track all but disappeared into the unknown depths of the Audacity ether. My solution to the problem of the unnerving top notes was to screech them out in a sort of breathy, strangulated tone which gradually fades away, giving what I’m now calling a sense of drama, and a touch of melancholy, to the piece. I sang the second verse in Latin, in honour of the fact that my singing teacher loves Enya and Enya sang her version partly in Latin. I had the words on a bit of A4 paper propped up on a kitchen chair in front of me and, disastrously too late, I discovered that the mic stand covered the word ‘Filio’ just as I was in full screech song, so I sang ‘Elio’ instead in a desperate attempt to cover the mishap.

Yes, I now have a mic stand, after years of sitting hunched on a chair with the mic in my hand. Astonishingly and amazingly (much in the manner of a Christian Christmas miracle) the husband found a mic stand in the garage. My teacher had suggested I get a stand, as singing is so much easier when you stand up. I was about to go on Amazon when the husband appeared with his filthy mic stand, complete with a Rode mic. I was ecstatic, being that Rode mics are definitely a step up from my cheapie USB one. However, the husband has to find out if he can get the Rode mic working, so we spent about an hour faffing about trying to attach my mic to the stand. I also cleaned it, in fear that rats, mice and other vermin had probably been swarming all over it in its previous home in the garage.

As usual, it was an utter pain to try and adjust backing track level to voice level and the track got rather lost in the mix. In the end I gave up. So Blog, here for you, and my teacher, is O Come, O Come Emmanuel.