Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Countdown to Idol

It's countdown time - the first round of Voicetrax Idol: LA hits on Saturday, September 12th. Deep breathing and working practice scripts shall ensue for the next dozen days...

For those of you not intimately aware - the Voicetrax Idol events are patterned after some large vocal talent contest which they tell me appears now and again on television. In this case, we're dealing with voice work, rather than singing. There are two editions of this - "LA Idol", in which the winner(s) end(s) up with a week of auditions at the major Los Angeles voiceover talent agency, and "SF Idol", where the winner gets representation with a San Francisco talent agency for 6 months.

The format has a couple rounds of competition, and the goal for me this time around is to get past the first one. This will be my third time in the competition. I did the LA a year ago, and it was a great experience, but I felt more like "pack fodder*" and was a little overwhelmed by the level of the other competitors. Most of the folks who showed up I'd never seen before in my classes, they all seemed to know one another and most of them were represented and working. All good, as they say, and I'm pretty happy with what I did. It was just that the folks who moved on seemed to do just a little more.

The SF Idol this spring was a bad patch. I'd love to claim that aliens possessed my brain, or even that the dingos ate my baby, but the fact is I started out of balance and it went downhill from there. Got clipped at the first cutoff.

The question now is whether I learned from the most recent competition. And the classes. And the privates. And all the reads since then.

Which is why I'm counting down the days. And breathing. And relaxing. It's just that funny balance of pushing yourself a certain direction and then getting out of your own way. I love this kind of stuff the way I love bike racing - the anticipation, the feeling of excitement and dread, the focus that comes when you toe the line.

*bike geek term for folks who fill out the pack in a bike race.

In other news, Voicetrax decided that there was so much interest in the Idol series that they filled another SF Idol for the fall. The first round went off a week or so ago, and the first round winners were announced yesterday.

Here's a big congratulations to all the folks who are moving on:
  • Patty Allen
  • Vicki Baum
  • Nigel Ball
  • Annalisa Bastiani
  • Alyson Casas
  • Lynn Douglas
  • Roni Gallimore
  • Dan Greenblatt
  • Maureen O’Donoghue
  • Liz O’Keefe
  • Rob Sandusky
I know a number of the first round winners quite well from classes, and it's hard to root for any one of the talented people listed above over anyone else.

Good luck to all in the next round! Bring it and have fun.

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