Category: Free Inquiry
It is getting to the end of the semester, which means I need to meet my final goal for the Musicianship Goal plan. There is one song left called “Clementine.” This is the hardest song in all three of the songs I included in my plan. I have tried to play it a few times, but I’m struggling with frequent chord switches while managing the patterns. By now, I have one more week to practice until the video recording, hope I’ll do well.
As Dr. Prest stated in the feedback of my midterm demonstration, not every chord is included in the songs that I chose. Therefore, I will record a video of me playing all 6 chords: Em, A, G, D, C, and E.
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This week I have been practicing a new song called Land of the Silver Birch. Although it only has one chord, I have struggled a little with what kind of strumming pattern I should use. I have tried many patterns for this song and finally, I came up with a pattern that follows the rhythm of the song. Here is the video.
Movie on 2020-11-10 at 11.31 AM
Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash
This week, I mainly focused on practicing switch chords. I still couldn’t switch between chords smoothly, sometimes I have to pause so that I can move my fingers to the next chord, and sometimes it makes a weird sound when l move my fingers.
I can move my fingers quickly and accurately between G and Em, but once it gets to D or C, it takes me a little bit more time to adjust my figures. I have been practicing to move my fingers between strumming the strings, but I can’t always get the perfect timing to do that.
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As we reached the midterm of this semester, here is a video of my first guitar song play.
Last Week Before Midterm
This week is the last week before the midterm, which means I should reach my musical growth plan goal up to October 30th.
I forgot to mention that I have learned the A chord in last week’s post; therefore, this week’s learning is on D and E chords are just putting one more finger on the G string in addition to Em. D chord is the one I found difficult among all of the chord I have learned so far, It’s hard to put three of your fingers closely while avoid overlapping the near strings.
I have also been playing with different patterns, which is preparing for the first song I’m going to play-Cotton Eye Joe. Soon, I will post the video which filmed me playing the song with the guitar.
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This week I talked with two of my classmates who are also learning guitar as beginners. We shared some reflections on our learning experiences, such as which chord was the most difficult to learn or what kind of pattern we have practiced.
Also, we have discovered a very useful tool for guitar tuning. It is an app called GuitarTuna. We have found it is really useful for beginners like us since we are not familiar with the sound of every string on the guitar.
About this week’s learning, I found that I can switch chords a little faster than better, but still not as smooth as it should be.
Busy Week, Little Time.
This week I got a very busy schedule with both school and work. Although, I still managed to find some time with guitar practicing. This week I only leaned one chord-Em, which is an easy chord but still I ran into some difficulties.
I figured out how to place my fingers on guitar for Em pretty quick, but at the beginning it had a very dull sound. It was quite different than what it suppose sounds like. Therefore, I went to Youtube and tried to search up some video that might help me; lucky, I have found one video which solved my problem. Turns out, it makes the dull sound because of one of my figure was catching the nearby string which I should not have.
To those who might have the same question, here is the video that I found helpful.
As for my Free Inquiry topic, mainly I will focus on my guitar learning process, but I will also post some information or resources that is related to music teaching or using music in classroom learning.
I found some great studying resources on OER Commons, there are videos for guitar fundamental learning and music teaching in elementary classrooms. I will keeping looking for valuable resources on OER websites to support my future study and this Free Inquiry assignment.
Starting Point!
This week I finally decided to pick up a guitar and begin my learning!
Learning how to play guitar is something I wanted to do for a very long time. This semester my EDCI 306 class has an assignment which I need to learn a music instrument for this course, and guitar has became my first option.
I started by reviewing an online learning tool which was introduced by my music instructor. It has all kinds of online learning classes of guitar, ukulele, and recorder. I found some very useful tools like a guitar turner where I can adjust my guitar string based on the sound it provides.
Tools and classes are all set, it’s time to star!
This week I set an easy goal for myself as the first step, just learning two chords-G and C. I found G is pretty easy to play, but C felt a little bit uncomfortable for me to place my fingers on guitar that way and hold it. Besides that, I also tried to play a strumming pattern (basically what I did was just playing every string from top to bottom).
Unfortunately, I only had a little time this week with my guitar and I couldn’t learn much with it. Hopefully I will have more time next week and learn few more chords 🙂
The most memorable piece from this week:
My figures are really hurt.
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