This week, I fell back into my habits of procrastination. Luckily for me, a large portion of this inquiry project is recognizing my musical instrument procrastinating ways and trying to overcome them. I spent the majority of the week playing my other instruments rather than learning the keyboard. I gravitate towards my other instruments because I am much more familiar and comfortable with them, so I had to remind myself that since I am just beginning keyboard, I need to give myself grace for feeling unfamiliar.
When I eventually did turn on and practice my keyboard, I continued to work on playing with both my left and right hand at the same time. I still have yet to master this, but practice makes perfect (so I should stop procrastinating practicing). One other issue I ran into this week was recognizing keys. Last week, I labelled seven keys on the keyboard to help me learn to recognize their placement. However, this week I had to play the same notes but higher up the keyboard, where they were unlabelled. It consistently took me too long to find where the key was, leading me to miss that part of the song completely. For reference, this week I learnt the song “Married Life” from Disney’s “Up”.
To help combat my slow process of identifying keys, I switched the video’s playback speed to 0.25 and then increasing it to 0.5. The big goal is to eventually play it at the normal speed, but that was not something I could do this week.
Furthermore, I found an article by Euro Pianos Naples that breaks down piano keys and how to identify them. It has assisted me in understanding the relationships among keys, which helps me identify them quickly.
Overall, I would call it a fairly successful week! See you next week (where I will hopefully practice more)!
