Monday Mania!

This morning on my way to the library I saw Knightro on a scooter. I really like college.

Happy Monday, y'all :) I'm currently at the library planning for the week, working on music, and studying for some exams I have coming up. It's a busy week! But first, I wanna talk about my awesome weekend.

On Saturday, I attended a day of workshops, master classes, and performances presented by The Vocal Company called A Cappella Ed. As all a cappella events do, this event kicked ass. I attended workshops about recording, visual performance, and listening to music; So Noted had the honor of working on two of our songs with the Vocal Percussionist of Jaded and The Executive Board, Rachel Chalhoub.

Rachel Chalhoub (Sara Bareilles look-alike and new girl crush) and myself after our master class!

The master class was really awesome. Since Rachel is a vocal percussionist, she had a lot of stylistic advice for our music and she helped us bring out more expression in our two songs - simply by being more percussive. Master classes are always opportunities that you don't want to miss in collegiate a cappella. Not only do they bring in different opinions, but they can bring in advanced advice that they can back up with professional experience. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot from Rachel!

And then we wanted to sing ET for her, but we didn't have a vocal percussionist present at that moment for it. Amelia, our music director, asked Rachel if she'd like to try it. I handed her my music, and next thing you know...

A Cappella Ed inspired me a lot. There are so many aspects of a cappella groups that you don't think about until an event such as this, and I know that my group is now overflowing with ideas and excitement about a cappella. It was definitely a kind of renewal that we needed.

So Noted is starting to work on the above song, "I Can't Make You Love Me" by Bonnie Raitt (I posted the Bon Iver version because I just discovered it and I love it) mashed up with "Stay" by Rihanna. I'm really looking forward to working on it! The arrangement is really cool and it's going to be fun to perform. Other than that, So Noted is just trucking along with perfecting our music and preparing for SoJam and ICCA. Our ICCA arrangements are certainly coming along; I've been working on Lois Lane a lot and I think it's going to be pretty much finished within the week.

Did you know that UCF beat Louisville this weekend? And now we're in the BCS Top 25? I mean, you could say we're pretty excited around here. I know I am!

This is a cute little sloth.

This week is just going to be full of school school school music music music. I have a statistics exam on Wednesday, four sociology of deviance assignments due Sunday, and lots of music work wherever it'll fit this week. One good thing about this week is that I'm finally getting groceries! I've been a little lazy/broke lately and have basically only eaten granola bars and mall food for the past few weeks. My body is not happy with this abuse, and today I finally have a shopping list and coupons ready to get some real food in my apartment. It's gonna be awesome.

My planner for the week! It looks really boring right now. Oh well. My planner is getting pretty popular on the Planner Addicts Facebook page - it makes me feel special. They asked me to post a video tour of it! If I do, I'll post it here too. Because I know my two followers really wanna know. ;)

Anyway, I've gotta get to work! I will leave you with a wonderful two-person a cappella cover of "I Choose You" by Sara Bareilles.

Have an awesome week!