Sunday, April 30, 2006

The Crud is Worse

My sinus junk cleared up long enough for me to be able to sing fairly well today and then came back with a vengeance. Ok, maybe that's a bit extreme, but I definitely feel worse now that I did Friday or Saturday. I went from being pretty plugged up to being able to breathe out of both nostrils this morning. And by this afternoon I was totally plugged up again. I'm sure God (hopefully) doesn't think like this, but it's like He's saying, "Ok, you did this thing for me that I wanted you to do and now that you're done with it you can go back to feeling terrible." So, whatever, that's fine. I've felt a heck of a lot worse than this in my life. I'm just glad that it went away long enough for me to do what needed to be done.

By the way, I think things went pretty well this morning with the music stuff at church. I was pretty iffy on some things during sound check but it all came together pretty well. Usually when I sing serveral songs, I make a couple of little or not so little mistakes. And I don't think I did anything too weird today. I had fun and I enjoyed being able to breathe out of my nose for a few hours.

8 comments:

Jim Looby said...

I've noticed this weird phenomenon whenever I play in front of people (I think Maury can back me up on this one...): If soundcheck is terrible (or just "not great") the performance goes very well. The inverse seems to be true as well. I had it happen yesterday at church. Soundcheck was great, no problems, piece of cake. The service was... a little rough. Anyone else notice this? Or is it just some weird neurosis of mine?

Maury said...

I was pleased with the service.

I liked the fact that things were just enough on the edge of uncertainty that we all had to really be on our toes and really playing. I'm not into the "polished" and fabricated sounding crap -- I prefer things a little bit raw and more "live rock show."

Imagine that.

Phillip Hintze said...

I think that we sounded as good as we have in a long time. There were several reasons for it. Maury mentioned one of those reasons.

I think that the instrumentation was another thing. Electric guitar, bass, drums, percussion, and no more than 2 singers at a time. If we had more time to hammer out our guitar parts, then 2 guitars would be fine. However, we don't really have that much time, so we end up stepping on each others toes a little too often. Everything sounded open and uncluttered. I liked that.

I might be in the minority here (and I probably am) but I think that less is more, especially when it comes to vocal harmony. Here's a little metaphor: I like mustard. I like a little on my hamburgers and I like it with sausage (especially spicy brown mustard with bratwurst), but I don't want it on a baked potato or a slice of pizza, and I certainly don't want any in my crawfish etoufee. My point is that vocal harmony is a condiment, not a main course, so you certainly don't need to slather it all over a song unless you want it to taste like mustard.

Maury said...

That's for bleedin' sure.

Choirs are so passé.

Jenny Hintze said...

Hey, what about....

"Jenny exudes confidence and has a voice like an angel!"

Nobody said that. Come on, guys.

Phillip Hintze said...

What reality? Would you care to enlighten us?

As far as the humility thing, these comments are very tongue-in-cheek. Jenny, Maury, and I are sarcastic people, and if you knew us at all then you'd know not to take us seriously about all this stuff.

In all honesty, I thought that the services on Sunday went really well. I may be deluded in thinking so, but maybe not. I'll be the first to admit when I stink it up, and I'm pretty hesitant to pat myself on the back. In fact, whenever someone tells me that I played well or whatever, I have to resist the urge to argue with them and tell them all the different ways that I screwed up.

To each his own...

Jenny Hintze said...

It seems to me that maybe "observer" from my post on the 26th and "superbatman" from today may be the same person.

I am far more critical about my abilities than anybody else. And really, I don't even know why I feel the need to explain myself to someone who is too much of a coward to identify themselves.

Maury said...

I think I know who this person is. But I'll tell you what, "SuperBatmanObserver": you grab me a bit of reality and humility while you grab yourself a sense of humor and a life.

It must suck having such a negative outlook on things like you do. Always looking for that person in church that puts their feet on the chair so you can tell them quit. Always looking for the boys that spend too much time talking to the girls so you can tell them to move along. Always looking for someone doing something bad or wrong.

What a horrible existence.

So maybe, just maybe, you ought to come down off your pedestal to where all of us mere mortals live and recognize there actually is something called Life with Friends, and Life with Fun, and Life with Humor.

It's a whole new world down here.