There must be so many ways and maybe not all of them as exhausting as I found mine. I was two weeks in and fully focused in the late afternoon when suddenly I felt the energy drain right out of me.
I knew then that I had to stop for that day and take things carefully. I do have problems with energy conservation but this had taken me by surprise.
Fortunately, tune and harmonies were finished and I had just started recording the learning tracks. My friend Tom Sykes was doing this with me. I had planned for us to do it together but he suggested we try it remotely. This was fine except that it meant I needed to learn a new system and my brain wasn’t letting anything more in.
Some people call this tiredness Chronic Fatigue, others M.E. and yet others think it’s all made up. I don’t like the term M.E. because it sounds too much like an identification of oneself. Really, I don’t know what this tiredness is, I just experience it.
In order to carry on and be able to finish my task by the beginning of March, I had to have some time off and then go slowly. My tiredness was persistent and I could only do small amounts of work at a time. The other difficulty was that I couldn’t sing very well and I kept making mistakes in the recordings.
The process was, I’d record a track and send it to Tom. He would then learn it, record it and send his part back to me.
We managed to complete them last weekend and I spent most of Monday doing some of mine again as my voice was a little better and then mixing them together. It’s the sort of thing that you could go on doing for ever. Eventually I had to tell myself that, although it wasn’t quite right, it was good enough.
Once I’d decided that, oh what sweet relief!!
This is the link to the learning tracks on this website. https://claresmanythreads.com/song-wave-audio-tracks-and-lyrics/
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