Activities

When I was 13 around I started to play some guitar, unfortunately without teacher. So I could play chords, which was mostly enough to help mit with some singing. Around my age of 15 I started to learn and play Hammond organ. With the aim of my parents I could earn some first good money from playing at weddings and birthday parties. Meanwhile I also liked to play a little bit trumpet.

Looking backward I think playing music, especially in public made me more self confident.

End of 2017 I got the chance to be part of the choral choir in the musical “Der Glöckner von Notre Dame“, first in Munich than later in Stuttgart as well. By this I could be on stage for total 134 shows with excellent professional musicians.

After this I become a member of the extra choir at theatre Ulm and till today I could be again on stage on different productions (e.g. Evita, La Cage aux Folles, Czardasfürstin, Dracula).

Due to the Corona epidemic situation and lockdowns I found another way to continue practice singing with a friend I got to know in Stuttgart. We both love musical duets and started to do a new project called Passion In the Air

As I always had to much interests at the same time, I never could come to a point I could play an instrument very well. And I still like to improve my skill, especially I really like to be able to play piano better.

Tools

In addition to “just” making music, I like all technical things around it (because I am en engineer?). When the first software programs for entering notation into the computer I was very fascinated, how easy it is to create own sheets, play the music from this sheets. As it is possbile to export this sheets to midi (or import from midi) and mp3 it is very simple to use the result for training the own voice, e.g. in the choir. Or to use another tool analyzing the quality of the singing based on the midi files.

I am faszinated from creation own music as well. And there are a lot of tools available as well to support with high quality sounds nowadays.

muscescore

In the beginning I started with CAPELLA, which I will mention later again. This tool is very powerful but a little expensive as well. Nowadays I am using musescore, which is a free tool and I would say even more powerful than the last version I used from Capella.

After entering different voices (common for choir pieces) it is easy to create separtes sheets for each voice, play the voices with different instruments and volumens on PC or on the way.

Capella Melody trainer

That is another tool I like to recommend for practicing singing. Especially if the midi files of a song are available (I produce them with Musescore before) it gets very simple. Just load a file into the melody trainer, select which of the voices you want to train and start. Of course you need to set up your microphone before (e.g. headset), but you will be guided through all the necessary steps during installation.

When training with the melody trainer, you will see how good you hit the notes and how good the timing is during performing.

The price of 48 EUR (2.1.2018) is good for a tool telling you where you could improve without getting be blamed by a teacher.

n-Track

When I was a kid I did a lot of investigation in electronics even build up my own music mixer and voice changer. Nowadays things are so much easier, just with the help of a good software program. I started to use n-Track for recording very intensively and still happy with the functionality.