My EdTech Journey

Category: Free Inquiry

For anyone who wants to follow my guitar journey!

Week 5: Pinky And the Braun

Did you know your pinky is weak? I didn’t until I had to try and use it to play guitar a bunch. To make things worse, the next step on my guitar journey is learning the Peter Gunn theme. For the sake of practice, while picking this theme, we are expected to use all of our fingers for practice and this includes the pinky finger. While this may sound like nothing, using my pinky finger has been quite the challenge. But if my journey so far is any proof, a couple sour notes while I am learning something won’t stop me!

Luckily, I am working on more than that. Song practice is coming together, I can sort of play Born in the USA now, but just not for a consistent amount of time. I usually make a mistake or two a few bars in that throws me off. However, I can play each simple part of the song away from each other. Now, I just need to be able to consistently put all those skills together to make a coherent sounding song!

Lastly, I have also been working on a few mechanical skills: strumming on the beat, strumming mechanics, and tapping my foot to the beat. As someone who is not very rhythmically inclined, this has been a trial but a rewarding one.  The strumming mechanics in particular have been helping my playing sound more like someone playing the guitar!

As always, thanks for reading!!

 

Week 4: New Things are Exciting

So now that I have moved onto a new lesson and therefore practice plan, learning the guitar has gotten more engaging. I guess the moral of this is that it is important to keep things fresh. Since there’s not a lot to report other than this, I thought I’d share some of the resources I am using to practice!

Since I am still working on learning to tune the guitar on my lonesome, I have been using this app to check my work

In previous posts I have mentioned JustinGuitar as the main resource I am using to practice but I have not linked his website or youtube channel before (for when you decide to start your guitar journey).

For my song practice I have been using two videos:

Thanks for reading! Have a good day!

Week 3: Diminishing Returns

This is going to be a short one…

How Not to Form Habits

According to Lally et al. in How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real worldit takes between 18 to 254 days to completely form a habit.

So what I am saying is, that not playing guitar over Thanksgiving weekend is not an effective way to form the habit. Especially when you continue not playing guitar into the next week. In fairness to me, I was at my partner’s parent’s house over Thanksgiving and they all know how to play at least one instrument. Joking aside, the point of this is to make sure that I continue to push through and play most days a week. I have been using my schooling and work as an excuse to not play but realistically, my plan is only to play 15 minutes a day. So it should be within my abilities to do it. Now, the issue is just taking the time to remember I need to do it as opposed to thinking because of school and work I can’t do it.

 

The Positives

Following the lesson plan made by Justin Guitar, I am eligible to move on to the next level. I plan to take the time to brush up on my guitar playing before I do move on to the next level. Thanks for reading, and by the time I get back to you hopefully I will also be all over the G & E chords!

 

Week 2: Stumbles and Triumphs

After a good week or so of playing, there have been ups and downs as expected. However, with a flood of assignments coming next week in my other classes I may have to cut my guitar playing a lot closer to that fifteen-minute minimum I outlined earlier. With that said, I thought it would beneficial to ruminate on what I felt like were the things to build on and the things to work on in the upcoming weeks.

 

Triumphs:

  • One part of my learning that has surprised me is how much I think about it outside of playing. On my visit to Claremont this Wednesday, I found myself sometimes daydreaming along with the other students as the two and a half hour classes dragged on. I thought about how guitar practice went on Tuesday and how I was proud of how it was feeling to get started again. I have tried to get started on the guitar on a few other occasions but never have I found myself thinking about too much. I think that blogging about it has forced me to be more thoughtful about how the learning process is going and has led me to be more focused on learning and how I am learning

 

  • Another aspect of this that I have found helpful is the environment I am in when playing. During previous attempts at learning the guitar, I was still living with my parents and I think that that made me more self-conscious of how it was sounding. Additionally, I was also always alone in my room when I was playing and I think that added to the insecurity I felt. Currently, I am living with my partner who has been a tremendous help while I am practicing, Unlike me (for now), she is a pretty musical person and knows how to play the guitar along with a couple other instruments. Having her around while I practice has allowed me to have a knowledgeable person to ask questions to and a support base when I am feeling down about how my playing sounds.

On the topic of how my playing sounds…

 

The Stumbles:

 

  • So I am not very good at this. That is to be expected, I mean I am a beginner. But the biggest hurdle for me in the past has always been the steep learning curve and how that makes me feel. I sometimes can be a bit of a perfectionist and that is quite harmful when needing to fail before getting better. Often times, the failures just lead to disillusionment and quitting when trying to learn new things. Although so far this insecurity has been kept in check I have had moments of frustration during this learning process. While those are expected, I need to focus on not letting that insecurity get to me and turn into giving up on the project as a whole as I have in the past and remember the comfort zone donut.

 

  • This upcoming week will also bring challenges as I have a lot of assignments due next week. This brings the challenge of sticking to my lesson plan.  This past week I already skipped a day because I was tired after our long Wednesday visits. Although I think it is okay to take a mental health day here and there, with the upcoming flood of school work it is important to remember my goal is only fifteen minutes a day. My goal is absolutely doable regardless of how many classes or assignments I have due any time soon.

 

Hopefully, this has illustrated where I am currently at in my guitar learning and how things are looking for this upcoming week. Thanks for reading and see you next week where maybe I work up the courage to post some of the footage I have!

Week 1: Getting Started on My Guitar Journey

Well… here we go! As of now, my main goal is to learn how to play the guitar. With resources as numerous as they are for a topic such as learning the guitar, I am starting out with a vague main goal to allow myself to branch out wherever I would like to go on this journey.  I also have a “sub-goal” that I decided on before I begin this in earnest. In my previous attempts to learn the guitar, I have always felt like practicing the basics has made me feel like I have nothing to show for it. So my first sub-goal will be to learn how to play a song.

Now that I have outlined my goals, let’s get into how I am going to do this. Luckily, there is no shortage of guitar tutorials on the internet. So after a little internet research, I have opted to tentatively use the online tutorials of a YouTuber named JustinGuitar. He also has a comprehensive website where I can mark each lesson he has as complete too!  My partner is also an experienced guitar player so I do have access to her knowledge should I need any hands-on guidance. For now, I do not plan on branching off the lesson plan set out by this YouTuber until I can feel comfortable about being more independent in my guitar learning. I feel like keeping a strict regimen will be the key to success here as previous attempts have been less structured.

So as far as what my lessons will look like for now, I will be trying to get in 15 minutes of playing guitar a day. The scheduling for those will look like this: 5 minutes of practicing my chord changes from A>D and D>A and 10 minutes of song practice. For the song practice, JustinGuitar has a list of A and D chord songs for students to learn and video tutorials to boot. Due to my now not-so-secret love for the Boss, I decided to learn “Born in the USA”.

As for how my project is going to look, I think I am planning to film my first 15 minute practices every week and cut them up into little chunks to share my fun bits and pieces of my progress here.

Hopefully, this sounds as exciting as I think it is going to be for me! Thanks for reading this and I hope you stick around with me on this journey!