I got the sound files back from the engineer. Six of them (four of these the ones I made on the day I was not singing well, which required splicing) sounded good. Two from the day I was singing well did not, which really upset me. Whether or not I sing as well as I would like, I can tell by how it feels most of the time if I sound good or I don't. Especially with high notes. Either it spins or it doesn't.
When I asked the engineer if he could make fixes to the ones that did not sound good (in the past, he seemed to offer to make fixes ad infinitum) he wrote me a nasty email saying that there was nothing he could do and that sometimes I don't really sing - I just scream.
Let me make one thing absolutely clear: No one gets away with insulting me that way and stays in my life. Constructive criticism is one thing (e.g., "that didn't sound good, you should do it over for the recording" - which he actually said a few times on the day I wasn't feeling well - or "I don't think that aria is ready to be recorded, why don't you choose something else" which would have been fine too) but an insult that has no counterweight and is not a gateway to a problem-solving process is not acceptable.
I am almost afraid to write any more, because I was feeling depressed. If my "good" singing isn't even good, what's the point?
I think a place to start is to send all the files to my teacher, including the bad ones, and ask him what he thinks.
One thing the engineer did say was that on the second day he had me stand farther away from the mike and that also I was moving around more. The latter is probably true. Although I was feeling good, I was very nervous as a result of how badly I had sung in the first session, and I know moving around keeps my nerves under control and helps me sing better (and looks good onstage - moving during "Condotta" in my concert made the aria come across as exciting and dynamic). So should I have been wearing a body mike? I am not well informed about those things and thought that he was.
So we left it that he would put everything on a CD and then "call it quits". That was my phrase, which could be interpreted two ways: either we wouldn't do any more tweaking with the files that don't sound good, or we would call our relationship quits, at least for a good long time. That's too bad, in that I have known him since I was 14, but he was a friend of my mother's not of mine, really (I mean he is much younger than she was - he's probably in his mid 70s).
Then he wrote back and said he would try to make some improvements to the "bad" files. I hope they sound good enough that I can have a CD with eight arias on it to sell at the church, but if not, I can have six decent mp3 files to post here and there.
Some day I may have to be nothing but a church soloist singing things that never go above an F or a G, but that day is not today. I mean I love church music and I have enormous respect for the church where I sing (which is why I made a donation to them) but I am not Christian, and I am definitely not virtuous! (I am finished with monogamy as a lifstyle for starters, which is not the sort of thing I usually post here, but it exemplifies why I am happier as a Pagan with some Christian edges than I would be considering being Baptised!) And I ain't ready to give up shaking my booty, tearing my hair, chewing up the scenery, and being a drama queen. Which I can't do in a church.
ETA: I removed all the sound links from this blog. Someone made a nasty comment (there's a difference between constructive criticism, which is balanced, and nastiness, which wipes a person out totally) This is a good object lesson that I need to be selective in whom I solicit feedback from. My teacher tells me what does/does not sound good, which is different from basically saying I should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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