Well it is all over, for almost 10 weeks I have been learning the guitar and that seems crazy to me. I remember at the beginning being pretty naive and thinking how easy it was going to be to learn the original musicianship goal I had set out for myself, I mean how hard could it be to learn three songs right… wrong it is very, very hard. I found out quickly that learning a instrument takes a ton of time, practice and especially patience, something I am working on as I enter my future career dealing with 20-25 young children all day. I am happy to say that this process has taught me a lot, I have learned that in order to achieve something like learning an instrument, in a short amount of time, you need to be willing to put in the work and effort. This was a struggle for me at the beginning, trying to find a good balance between my other 4 classes, work, my boyfriend and dog, and practicing. Everytime planned to practice the guitar, something that I believed was more important would come up and I would not get around to the guitar. I slowly learned that I need to block out time for practicing and make sure that I actually did it. I finally started to see progress and by midterm I was very proud of the accomplishments I made.
Now that I am at the end of my journey, I am even more proud of what I have accomplished. I do still find myself struggling with changing chords from G to D and learning new strumming patterns like the one for my newest song “Blown Away” are always challenging. Although these are challenging they remind me that practice makes perfect and if we do not put in the time and effort we will never get there. In my latest video uploads I show how I have improved in playing my first song “Pumped Up Kicks” as well as a second video showing my progress learning “Blown Away”. In the first video, I am still struggling with changing from G chord to D chord but I have really improved since my midterm on my strumming and progress of the song all together. As for my second video, the strumming pattern was very difficult for me to learn and I am still working on getting the rhythm down pat. The same chord change issues occur in this song as well but again in time I know that these chord changes will become easier. I look forward to continuing to learn the guitar as I find that this will be a helpful instrument to incorporate in my future classroom.
I am sorry for the poor quality of the audio in these videos, my phone was not working properly this day and I find that my computer makes everything sound a little funny, but I promise in person it sounded a lot better!
New Pumped Up Kicks:
Blown Away Cover:
