Anaheim Bound!

We did it again! Chameleon qualified for the international quartet contest again, and are planning to sing at the convention in early July. We had one major change this year... we switched parts earlier this year, and I'm back to lead and Dave is singing baritone. We made the change a couple months ago for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the big ones is that each of us is back to what is probably our more natural part.

I think we scored a 76.8% which is a bit lower than last year (both our qualifying score and our score in Nashville) which I was pretty surprised with (pleasantly surprised). Things seemed to come together in the last two and a half weeks... if you had asked me if we had a chance to qualify then, I'd have said no way.

It does feel a little different qualifying as a lead versus a baritone, like I'm not riding on any coattails. While I'm sure my quartet mates would say I wasn't, because I stepped into a hole in an already successful quartet, it felt that way a bit. With the part switch, it feels like a bit of new quartet, and I feel like there is more responsibility associated with being the lead singer in the quartet.

The convention was a great one, with a very deep Saturday night contest (7 Ontario quartets scored over 70% and there was one out of district quartet ("Big Time!") that scored a 79-ish). I do realize that the numbers will mean little to most of the people who read this... but 70% is pretty decent.

Another kinda cool thing that happened was that we had a post-contest session with one of the judges who remembered my college quartet from 9 years ago... and, in fact, he remember one of our songs and referred to it as our "hallmark song"... I didn't think we were 'famous' enough to have a hallmark song!

p.s. I know it's been a while... who knows if I'll start posting more often.

44th!!!

Well, we've returned from Nashville where my quartet finished 44th. We were pretty happy with out performance although we were singing in a pretty tough spot, first out of the gate in between previous champs "Realtime" and this year's eventual winner "O.C. Times". As for the scores (76.9%), I think we had hoped they would be a little bit higher, but we're not really worried about them all that much.

I always find internationals has a strange ambivalent effect on me. On one hand, watching great quartets is inspiring and motivates me to get better at this hobby. On the other hand, I watch the top 10 (or even top 20) quartets and think that I'll never be that good, no matter how hard I work. Oh well, such is life, I guess.