Q: how did you get good at singing? was it kind of a natural gift or did you have to practice it and get good technique down before you sounded nice. take us down the path of your singing journey.
A: it was kind of the last instrument i learned. also kind of necessary, unless i wanted to rely on another person to deliver my musical dreams. at a certain point i got serious about it and started recording myself playing keyboard / singing, on an extremely regular basis. none of the technical 'breathing' advice (or any other technical advice) ever made sense to me, i knew it was probably good advice but i was never capable of following it. breathing is too linked to thinking (not like thinking about your breathing, but like when you think about other things, you breathe based on your thoughts). one thing i discovered very quickly is that the only good moments i was ever able to achieve were when i was improvising the lyrics. the singing suddenly became good (sometimes) when i did that. similar phenomenon to why improvised acting always sounds so much more genuine than scripted (unless the actor has some kind of magical miracle technique, which some do). but the other thing, separate from that, is just simply the more you sing the better you get. and then of course when recording written material, i can do as many trillions of takes as i want and edit with an iron fist. and still in time you get better just from doing it. so that's pretty much how it went, and then particularly during 2015 i improved quite a bit from doing all those vines with singing in them. but sometime around 2018 i suddenly started to think i had damaged my voice, because there was a certain scratchiness that would keep coming back, and i realized that i had probably been pushing too hard to get certain high parts, on cycle mode, just hammering away at really hard takes, over and over and over again, etc.... and i also heard a rumor that 'clearing your throat is bad' (this is actually true) and i had NEVER known that until last year. and that is something i've been doing it all my life. so finding out it's harmful made me very concerned. i got my voice checked by a voice doctor and he said it's fine. but a few things i've learned since then, which have helped a lot: first of all, i have trained myself to stop clearing my throat (was difficult for the first few days but i quickly got used to it). my recording technique changed, i now do much fewer takes at a time, and i actually sit down and edit on the spot, and throw out what i don't like, which gives me a chance to rest and it also makes the process much faster. this was also necessitated when i made the dramatic switch to the 2 week process from what had been 8+ weeks, but it not only helped the speed tremendously but was also much better for my voice. and the other change i made was i started doing