Three of us made it out this week. We spent pretty much the entire time learning our new Samhain piece. I didn't anticipate this when I composed it, but it's proving a bit more challenging than the pieces from the Chants document. It has more verses and more variation in pitch than most of them, so it takes a bit longer to learn. An additional challenge is that we don't have sheet music for the pieces I composed, just lyrics sheets, so there aren't visual cues. I suppose the next skill I need to unlock is putting my compositions into standard sheet music! In the last 20 or 30 minutes of rehearsal, we worked on integrating our two changes to "Samhain's Door", singing it like a round and with the djembe. That arrangement still needs some tweaking but is coming along. In a small but exciting milestone, we now have so many recordings that I had to implement subfolders to the Recordings folder on the Drive. (I checked and the old links on the blog still work.) Similarly, the accounting document is getting unwieldy, so I plan to close that sheet out at the end of the year and start fresh with a new one in 2026.
If you'd like to review any of our material, the sheet music and recordings are available on our Drive. For the naming conventions of the recordings, see the document in our Drive. You can also listen to the TPC playlist of recordings of some of the pieces by professional artists on Spotify. If you're trying to practice at home and can't quite discern your note, you can use a keyboard app to plunk out whichever ones you're having trouble with. (This is by no means an official endorsement, but the app I use is "Voice Training - Learn to Sing" by the developer Learn to Master. It labels the notes on the keyboard and gives you real-time feedback on what note you're singing.) If you need a tutorial on how to read music, this one seems sufficient for helping you figure out which note you want to find on the keyboard.
