Nothing Matters

Yahoo! games, classic chess is really letting me down lately.  It keeps kicking me off my table for no reason.  Whenever this happens I lose the game.  I play whoever comes to my table, and I get kicked out of probably 2 games for every one I get to finish lately.  I'm beginning to wonder if it's my firewall or something like that and it doesn't happen to everyone.   Maybe I'll have to switch over to their new chess if that one doesn't have this problem.  Of course it freezes up and you lose the blitz game on time quite often, but it's 3 minute Blitz... the randomness from blunders, etc. is at least that bad anyway.  3 minute Blitz is not a serious game.  

Anyway as a result of this my rating has dipped below 1500, so I look like a n00b.  Earlier this evening I played one of the most perfect games I've ever played... and I can't bring it to you in a format you can play out on a java applet, because chesspublisher.com is also failing me!  If you go back to one of my older chess posts you'll see the applets are all errored out.  I'm hoping the site will come back, but until then here's some plain text.

Something amazing happened.  Even though I'm in the 2nd lowest rating class someone with above an 1800 actually came to my table and played me.  I creamed him/her in under 20 moves:

1. d4 c5 2. dxc5 e6 3. c3 Bxc5 4. Nf3 Nc6 5. e3 Nf6 6. Bb5 d5 7. Bxc6+ bxc6 8.
Nbd2 O-O 9. Nb3 Bd6 10. O-O e5 11. Bd2 e4 12. Nfd4 Bxh2+ 13. Kxh2 Ng4+ 14. Kg1
Qh4 15. Re1 Qxf2+ 16. Kh1 Qh4+ 17. Kg1 Qh2+ 18. Kf1 Qh1+ 19. Ke2 Qxg2#

My play was perfect according to Fritz 9 (after the "Old Benoni" opening, 1...c5, the "son of sorrow."  Fritz would never play that move as Black.)  Of course White's biggest mistake was 2. dxc5 giving me a free hand in the center.  After that 3. c3 and 5. e3 were both terrible for 2 reasons. 

1. White needs to play c4 or e4 to break up my center or I'll be better out of the opening, and playing e3 and c3 means it'll take an extra move to make either of those breaks, White is throwing away time with those little pawn moves while Black is developing his pieces and advancing the big center White was so nice as to give him by taking the c pawn on move 2. 

2. e3 and c3 together imprison white's dark-square bishop, a piece which will not see the the light of day for the entirety of the game. 

Those things considered it's easy to see why 7. Bxc6+ is one of the worst moves on the board.  White gives up his only good bishop and helps me reenforce Black's center in the process.  It's easy to play a "perfect game" when White plays this badly.  Yes my c pawn becomes a weakness but White won't get the time to exploit it. 

According to Fritz Black equalizes on move 3 and has a clearly won position on move 9.  The last 10 moves are a mop up with the flashy "Greek gift" sacrifice, i.e. 12... Bxh2+ which forces White to give up the queen... except White doesn't give up the queen, so s/he gets checkmated. 

After this game my opponent left the table, someone rated under 1300 took his/her place.  I was promptly kicked off my table, lost the game, swore at my computer, and now despite having played a near perfect (according the computer analysis) game at 3 minute Blitz pace and beating someone more than 500 points higher than me, my rating is lower than it was at the beginning of the night... so it'll be more awful opponents for me and games like this one will be rarer still... all of that will be some other night.  I'm fed up with Yahoo! just now.  Well the game is pretty anyway. 

Ty

When I first got into Speech Level Singing I was amazed at how easy it made everything, how a 1 hour lesson did more good than years of lessons with private and University teachers, etc... and then I was more amazed this information wasn't available everywhere.  

It took me longer to figure out this information is available everywhere.  The only obstacle to reaching it is the massive amount of bull$h1t that is also available everywhere.  In short, to find this information easily you have to already know what you're looking for. 

There are a lot of people selling it (try Singingsuccess.com if you want to pay a ton of money for very good stuff ... which was pretty much completely ripped off from Seth Riggs and I don't think they're paying him for it...) and even some people giving it away.  Last year I found some videos of James Meny, who has studied with Seth Riggs talking about some of the more basic pillars of SLS (but calling it "mixed voice technique" maybe to avoid lawsuits.)  It appears he isn't the only one giving it away the basics.

This site must be relatively new or I would have found it way back when I was having all my passagio trouble because it has the stupid-obvious title of http://singing-high.com/ (don't go to the site with the same name but no hyphen... it might be ok, IDK, but it appears to be for pay.)  So the color scheme of the site is annoying and hard to read... This guy is giving away all basic SLS exercises with some ok explanations where he explains kind of what's going on as well as some "crazier" stuff like the vocal fry, (Btw, I take back what I said about the vocal fry before.  If you can create an easy fry the vocal fry is the best thing since sliced bread... er ok... the best thing since the lip roll, which is the best thing since sliced bread.) though I think he's a little tense in his demonstration of the fry; it should be easier than that, and even some really unorthodox stuff that probably came from Brett Manning, reverse phonation to hit very high notes.  He goes up into whislte register in that demo by inhaling. 

But it's not just that.  He appears to have a practice ruitine of videos to sing along with in a daily (which I haven't been through yet... I'll update this if I find anything suspect in them.)  As long as your doing the lip rolls right (keeping the lips at a controlled speed which stays the same no matter what note you're on) doing such a vocal workout can only help your voice.  He doesn't appear to have seperate scales for men and women's voices... so you'll have to pick and choose your starting and ending pitches... but hay... it's free.

Summary:

http://singing-high.com/
appearts to be the best free program out there.
Yes, I know you already know how to do lip trills, and you probably think they're kid stuff and not very helpful, but I bet if you try this program for a few weeks you'll be astonished what it does to your singing voice.  Will you take that bet (of no money because the site is free?)

Happy holidays,

Ty