Oct 18: Chords
I had two minutes to play today. I practiced my chords.
Oct 19: Wedding song
I played a bunch of songs from the app, mostly melody lines. I feel like that helps my finger coordination and individual string picking.
Then to work on chords, I played Get to Know You and a couple Disney songs.
In other news, my music mentor’s wife is also a musician. Since her strength is in words, I sent her the lyrics for the wedding song. She took a look at it yesterday and helped me tighten up the chorus and bridge. She said she loved the story of it.
So I think the lyrics are done! Now I need to figure out the melody.
As I think I’ve mentioned, Get to Know You appeared fully formed in my head, including the melody. So I really feel like I’m starting from scratch with this one.
Should be an interesting ride!
Oct 20: Nervous
I played several melodies from the learning app; 2 Halloween ones, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Vivaldi.
Then I took requests from the family. That’s always interesting because my daughter always asks for songs I don’t have at first. I ended up playing Puff, Kiss the Girl, and Get to Know You.
Why am I nervous?
Because I’m nervous to try to put a melody to the wedding song.
I think my first step is to memorize it. Then maybe it’ll be less intimidating.
Oct 21: Requests
Today I asked my family for requests after I played a few songs from the learning app.
My daughter makes very difficult requests.
I have two song apps, one for guitar, which has a lot of older songs, and one for ukulele, which has more variety and a lot of newer songs.
Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of the uke songs on the guitar, because it has the same names for chords. It’s been working pretty well and I often forget that it’s not a guitar app.
Until today.
My daughter asked for Star Wars songs. The Imperial March sounded like it would be fun to play, so I went looking for it.
I found a lot of tabs (single string picking) and no chords. Makes sense, I thought. So I opened a tab.
And then I realized that I was in the uke app because it only had four strings.
Needless to say, I did not play the Imperial March today lol
Oct 22: Procrastinating
I keep delaying printing the wedding song. I’m so nervous about trying to put music to it.
Today I played some melodies from the learning app, some songs, and Get to Know you.
I realized that despite being able to sing along with one of my favourite Taylor Swift songs, I don’t actually know the melody.
So that was interesting.
And by interesting, I mean hilarious.
Oct 23: Old songs
I remembered that I had a binder of several songs that my dad had photocopied for me back in high school when I first tried learning guitar.
So after my learning app, I pulled out the binder. There were some songs that I was very happy to see, most especially The Rose by Amanda McBroom. I had forgotten how romantic that one is.
I think it was a song that I sang in high school choir, because the tune came really easily to my mind as I played. I really enjoyed my playing time today.
Oh, and I printed the wedding song. I’m going to start memorizing it.