High Achieving & Low Skilled

I had a real treat this week - I got to record some songs at a studio. When I say songs, I mean a bunch of 1 min theme songs and when I say studio, I mean the storage cupboard at my friend's place. But still, Razzle Dazzle!

Now I don't want to say I am bad at singing - I kind of know what to do to get some sort of acceptable sound out and my timing is fine, but I look like a newborn squirrel compared to my friend and comedic partner Dave. Dave is the musical one out of us. He comes  to me with a tune or a lot of times a whole chorus, and then sends it to me to add lyrics. These are hilarious, check out this one below. He didn't give me a lot to work with.

Now back to Dave's skill. He can lay down a vocal track first time, everytime. We would spend an hour getting my vocal with feedback such as:

'Come in earlier'... 'a bit more power'... 'watch your pronunciation'... 'more energy'... 'keep in character' and my all time favourite 'now in English'.

Then once we finish he will say 'Great, let me just get my vocal' and 2 mins later we are done. I tried to give feedback but he didn't appreciate my very useful 'let's try it in a Scottish accent'.

Out of all of my struggles with singing, my biggest challenge is that I find it hard to tell if something sounds good or not. Whenever I watch a talent show like "The Voice", I have to turn to my wife each time to say 'is that good?'

I remember once in high school I got a part in a musical. If you are familiar with the genre, there is usually a character that appears, does one killer song and then disappears. That was me. At one of our first rehearsals we did my song with the choir and I was singing along. Then the final note came and I belted out what I thought was the strongest and most impressive note in human history. When I finished there was stunned silence. Had this choir just heard the voice of an angel? I smiled until the teacher said loudly 'Don't ever do that again!'

The good news is that I am getting better. This week at the recording we got to a section and I got that feeling that I was going to do something special. I stepped forward slightly towards to mic and belted out the perfect tune. Have a listen:

This time I noticed what I had done #progress

This brings me back to the title of this blog, 'High Achieving yet Low Skilled'. This may be the motto of my life as I have seen this play out time and time again. If I have felt led to do something I haven't let the fact I have very little skill or experience stop me. I throw myself in and just struggle through it. It's funny though, if it is the right thing to do, taking that step of faith always comes with rewards.

After I got the part in the musical I was well in over my head. I had 6 months to improve my singing and there were only so many rehearsals, and I was a small but impressive part of the production. However things started to fall into place. The best private singing teacher in my city reached out to me and asked if I could act in her end of year production. She had the city's best singers but not any comedic actors (one of my skills). I asked her if she could also help me out as well and boom, I had 6 months of weekly singing lessons practising my one song for free. I smashed that performance getting a standing ovation on the last night..... in the middle of the show.

If I could be so bold as to ask, is there anything you have felt you need to do/start/create but have dismissed it because you don't have to skills to do it? Perhaps it's time to throw yourself in, struggle through and see what amazing results come from being high achieving yet low skilled.