As I have previously mentioned, us musicians are procrastinators by default; we simply won’t do things when we should. Studying for exams is no exception. Not only did I not start studying for the exam I had today until yesterday, I was such a scatter brain that I didn’t even realise the exam was today until Monday night.

Today’s exam was a written one. The only written exam I have this year, in fact. The subject was aural training. For those of you who aren’t in the know, this is an area of musical theory dealing with being able to translate what you hear to paper, and vise versa. This includes writing down melodies, chords, scales and rythms that are played or sung for you. In general, I am quite good at this without even trying, but this year things have steadily become more difficult, as they tend to do, and I have steadily become more lazy.

I still do well with melody without flinching; I have after all been reading and writing sheet music since about age nine, so this comes very naturally to me. I’m pretty good at recognising chords, and the scales and modes you just have to find little clues for and recognising them becomes easy (for instance, the Dorian mode has a minor third and seventh, but a major sixth). What I’m really bad at is rhythm. Don’t let that make you think that I have a bad sense of rhythm or tempo when it comes to performing music – I play tightly enough, and I’m good at feeling the rhythm when I sing – but the bits that they sing to us are not logical. These are not rhythmic patterns you’ll find in most songs. site down . They’re made to be difficult. The only ones that are simple and logical are the ones in 6/8.

I think I did well enough, and I’m glad to get it over with anyhow. Now I have three exams left. I have my vocal exam concert on Tuesday (at 4:30 pm if anyone in the Oslo area is interested in dropping by, at NISS). Bit nervous… There are a couple of songs we haven’t rehearsed yet. I’m doing one of them tomorrow and the last one on Sunday. I had two rehearsals today, which left me rather tired, both physically, emotionally and vocally.

“Forty Six and Two” is going great, I think. We’re gonna go through it a few more times Sunday night, but it already sounds great, so I’m not worried, so long as I can learn the lyrics for the bridge properly… So many words. “Teardrop” will be fine, we know it from before because we did it at a previous project. Bit worried about “Alive”, which is from the last project and a self-composed tune, because we’re missing one guitarist and that’s the one I had to change drummers on, but it should be fine; we’re rehearsing it tomorrow. The last song (or, it’s the first in the set) is “Good Enough”, which I played at a house concert last autumn. I’m doing it with the same pianist. Last time, we rehearsed it for an hour and it went great at the concert. He’s such a good pianist, and since he’s played it before it should go well.

Then I have aural training oral and piano in the beginning of June. Feels like weeks away… I’m gonna have to focus on one exam at a time. When this one’s over, I’ll worry about the next.

In other news, I found out today that I’m not the only one who’s applied for a third year at the University of Wolverhampton after all, so yay! I’ve been worrying about not getting to know anyone or making any friends there; now there will be someone else I know there. Not only are they people I know, but people I like. I hope we all get in!

I think that’s it for now… I’m dead tired. Probably gonna go to bed soon. Good night, world!