I don't blame Yousician. I find their guitar-teaching app both fun and effective so why shouldn't they charge money for their service? Nevertheless, I'm not willing to fork up any money right now so if I want to continue with the challenges and activities, I'll have to wait 12 hours. In the meantime, Yousician does allow you to play activities you've already completed but without feedback or any kind of scoring which essentially takes the reward system out of the game. Instead, I watched a few instructional videos it offers on identifying strings and tones (and semitones). After exceeding my activities limit and watching all of the instructional videos available on Yousician, I decided to go back to practicing "The Scientist", hoping that the skills I practiced through Yousician would maybe improve my play. It didn't. My chord transitions are still sloppy and my strumming is still inconsistent. With Yousician, I'd fail multiple times before passing an activity.
Instead, to give you a sense of where I'm at, I've posted a short video of me playing one of the Yousician activities. It's really nice having a song to keep tempo with. Also, it drowns out my poor note playing.
So what did I achieve this week? I'm making decent progress, just not directly towards my goal of learning to play "The Scientist". But hey, progress is progress, right? Week 3 of my 20time project left me feeling a bit frustrated. It seemed that, despite my focused efforts, I wasn't making much progress with my comfortability on the guitar. My chord transitions weren't fluid, my fingers weren't finding the right positions on the fret board, and my strumming seemed sloppy and inconsistent. Also, playing the same 3 or 4 chords can get tedious really fast. As my interest and enthusiasm for this project started to wane, I began looking at the progress of my colleagues. One of the members of my 20time House, Megan Gonzalez, explained how she began learning the piano using a training game called Synthesia. While I read Megan's description of this program and how helpful this resource was for her, it occurred to me that I hadn't given these types of programs a chance for my project, and I remembered seeing an advertisement for a free program on www.Ultimate-Guitar.com called Yousician. I decided to check it out.
I wish I was the kind of person who had the patience and will power to practice chords or a song for hours on end, but that's not me. I'm the kind of person who needs parameters, objectives, and some kind of specified challenge. This goals-based approach to learning is exactly what I needed. The gradual increase in pace and complexity of each activity was just difficult enough to force me to stop thinking about where my fingers were and just play. This kind of encouragement to play faster and just beyond my comfort level is difficult for me to emulate on my own. I think that if I can log a few more hours on this program, I can make some substantial progress. This week didn't get me any closer to playing "The Scientist" specifically, but Yousician has reinvigorated my resolve to learn and has helped me establish gradual skill development goals. Hopefully by my next and final post, I can confidently display my progress in the form of a Youtube video.
This video has been fantastic since its version of Bm7 is WAY easier and it also introduced me to a different strumming pattern that gives the song a little more personality. I've tinkered around with different strategies for practicing chord progressions. I've tried playing the same two chords in quick succession over and over again in order to get my clumsy fingers accustomed to those particular movements. I've tried looking away from the guitar as I move my fingers from one chord to the next, trying to train my brain to find the right location on the fret board without having to look. I've also just tried performing the song to see how much things would simply fall into place if I tried to put it all together. That didn't work out so well. What I found out is that trying to sing music lyrics while also concentrating on playing the guitar chords correctly was computation overload. As soon as I began singing, my fingers would forget what they were supposed to be doing. At one point, I took a break from practicing to see if watching other amateurs playing would help me visualize what I needed to do to play correctly. Here are two videos I stumbled upon.
This wasn't helpful so much as it was discouraging. I thought both of these renditions were absolutely terrific and suddenly I feel even further from reaching my goal. Nevertheless, I shall continue to practice until my finished product sounds something close to what I've found on Youtube. I remember reading about the "10,000 hour" rule in a Malcolm Gladwell book. The rule states that in order to reach mastery of something, one must dedicate 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. The way I see it, I only need about 9,990 more hours to achieve acoustic guitar mastery. Unfortunately, since time is finite and this project is only supposed to go on for 5 weeks, I'm going to be a little shy of that number. However, my plan is that by the end of week 5, I'll be confident enough with my progress to post a video of me playing "The Scientist" to the best of my current ability. For now, I'll spare you the auditory anguish.
It's week 2 and I've been itching to get the guitar back in my hands. This week, I picked up where I left off by accessing the "chord trainer" tool in Garage Band, but I quickly found it frustrating due the fact I seem to be playing the chords correctly and yet the program is telling me I'm doing it wrong. Because of this, I decided, instead, to start researching the chords necessary to play "The Scientist." Through YouTube, I quickly came across this video compliments of Mahalo.com.
Once my capo arrived, I immediately dove back into the YouTube video from Mahalo.com. I learned that, in order to play "The Scientist", I only needed to practice 4 chords with 2 chord variations: B minor 7, G, D, A, and Dsus2 and A7. I consider Dsus2 and A7 variations since the only difference between them and D and A is you play with one less finger on a string (with my finger placement, both are played without the middle finger placement). Trying these chords out in the proper order got me excited since I could hear the tune of the song! I feel so much closer to my goal! My biggest hurdle now? B minor 7. Bm7 is a bar chord, meaning the index finger goes across all but one of the strings. Additionally, for Bm7, a finger also goes on the second string of the third fret and on the fourth string of the fourth fret. To learn this god-forsaken chord, I used the YouTube video below. But when I say I used this video to "learn" how to play Bm7, what I mean is that I know where one's fingers should be. I have yet to figure out how in the world you can get your fingers to stretch and bend far enough to actually play this chord. I spend a solid 10 minutes just trying to get it to sound right but no matter what I do, one of the strings ends up getting muted. In other words, I'm putting weak pressure on a string so that it comes out flat when I strum. I decided to take a break from Bm7 and play the other chords instead. I'm still having trouble transitioning from one chord to the next. My head swivels back and fourth as I concentrate on my strumming hand and then my chord playing hand. I think my plan moving forward will be finding a resource that will help me speed up my transitions. It's also clear that I just need more practice. Also, I'll need to set aside time to solely work on the dreaded Bm7 chord. Lastly, I may want to look into finger exercises that might make bar chords not seem so impossible.
That's all for now. See you next week.
After only a few minutes of practicing the "G" and "C" chords, the tips of my fingers on my left hand were killing me. I've heard that it takes awhile to get your fingers acclimated to playing the guitar, but I didn't think I'd last such a measly amount of time. I persisted awhile longer but after 10-15 minutes, I had to call it quits out of concern that my fingers would forever be marked with guitar string indentations. The next day, I picked up where I left off , practicing "G" and "C" and learning two new chords, "A" and "D." My fingers had a raw quality before I even began and I was able to practice for a lot longer, although I didn't feel like I made much progress. A guitar is a foreign place to my fingers. Even the pick seems to try and squirm out of my hand as a awkwardly try strumming. The sounds coming from my digital teacher's guitar, on Garage Band, sound far superior to the "noise" I'm making. Fortunately, I stumbled upon another helpful tool on Garage Band: a chord trainer.
After assessing feedback from my peers and reflecting on my two project proposals, I've decided to learn "The Scientist" by Coldplay on the acoustic guitar. It seems outrageous to me that I would love music as much as I do and not know how to play even one instrument. I believe learning to play a song on guitar will be a wonderful way to take a break from the academic rigor of the teaching credential program and all of the reading and writing that comes with it. Also, the more I thought about my song selection of "The Scientist", the more excited I was at the prospect of learning it. Coldplay was one of my favorite bands growing up and I remember watching their music video, embedded below, for "The Scientist" over and over.
I remember hearing that Chris Martin, the lead singer, had to learn how to mouth the lyrics backwards so that the story could be told in reverse chronological order. If you watch his mouth closely, you can almost tell sometimes the words don't quite match up. Still, it's a pretty amazing feat and terrifically creative. What I also like about this song is that the primary instrument is piano. If I'm successful in learning this song on guitar, perhaps I can try to learn it on the piano next!
Now that I've chosen my project, my first objective is to acquire a guitar by the cheapest means possible and then learn how to tune it. Check back here soon to see how I'm progressing.
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AuthorOn this page, I will document my progress throughout my 20% Project. The purpose of this activity is to see first hand how a 20time project can be used in education. Archives
May 2016
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