Weeks 11-12 · meta · error category labelling
Name what went wrong before you try to fix it.
The categories
pass: tag correctly in 8/10
Every miss falls into exactly one of six categories. Pitch (flat/sharp/wandering), timing (early/late/drift), onset (hard/breathy/glottal), vowel (wrong shape or colour), breath (gasp/collapse), memory (forgot or wrong order). The emerald node is the one you’d pick for the example shown — the labels are the entire vocabulary you need to talk to yourself about your own singing.
Hear it first
Three short clips so the categories aren’t just words. The pitch error is flat by 30¢ on the high note. The timing error rushes by an eighth-note. The onset error is a hard glottal slam on every attack. Hearing them named makes them audible in your own takes.
When to use this skill.Any time you take a phrase and it didn’t feel right — but you can’t articulate why. Untrained self-coaching loops on “that was bad” for weeks; trained self-coaching jumps from “bad” to “flat on the high note” to “run single-note-match for five minutes.” The label is the bridge between perception and action.
Why these six categories specifically. Each of the six maps to a distinct measurable signal in the curriculum — pitch hits the cents-error meter, timing hits the millisecond-asynchrony meter, vowel hits the formant detector, and so on. The categories aren’t arbitrary; they are the actual measurements your earlier lessons train. If you can tag the category, you can pick the drill (the next lesson, rescue-drill-selection, closes that loop).
Why this is the apex meta-skill. Self-diagnosis is what makes the curriculum work without a teacher in the room. It’s also the gate: until you can name your own miss, you can’t take advantage of rescue-drill-selection or two-phrase-memory. 10 mixed examples (5 synth audio + 5 written descriptions) — tag correctly in 8 to promote.
Session ahead
10 trials · 5 audio + 5 described · 8/10 correct promotes.