Category: Free Inquiry (page 1 of 1)

Wow! Week ten already? What a journey this has been. I feel like I have come a long way in my keyboard skills. This week was a little different than past weeks. I have been dog-sitting at a house that has a real piano! So not only have I had a lot of time to practice, but I have had the opportunity to play on a real piano with incredible sound. Don’t get me wrong, I love my keyboard, but it is very evident while playing it that it was very cheap. It just does not produce the same sound that a real piano does, so the opportunity to play a real one was like a dream.

If you have read a large portion of these blogs, then you would know that I love to play music from the Oscar-winning film La La Land. So, the first thing I did at this piano was play “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme”, but from memory! I could really only remember the main melody of the song, but I was still pretty proud of what I did remember!

As for the rest of my practice time, I focussed on three other great songs.

The first is “Married Life” from Disney’s “Up”. I was already familiar with playing a bit of this song, but I wanted to hear it played on the real piano. “Up” is a very important movie to me and I was very glad to play a from it this week to remind me why it is such an incredible movie.

The next song I focussed on this week was one that I have wanted to learn for a very long time. It was “Starting Line” by Luke Hemmings. I have been a fan of Luke Hemmings since I was a kid and when he released the song “Starting Line”, I knew that I wanted to learn it on the piano one day. Luckily, I now have the basic skils and access to learn this song! I used a website that listed chords for this piece.

The third song I worked on this week was one that I tried to learn a few years ago during one of my many attempts to learn the keyboard. I decided it was time to conquer it once and for all. The song is “Marry You” by Bruno Mars, and it was a lot of fun to play! I had to slow down the playback speed at first, but eventually, I was able to play at the normal speed. This was a hug win for a younger version of myself.

Thank you to everyone who followed along on this journey or to anybody who is just popping by to say hello. If you think you are too old to learn something new, trust me, you are not. If I can beat my piano-procrastination, you can too 🙂

This week was the complete opposite of last week where I consistently practiced a wide variety of skills every day. School and work got the best of me this week and I only practiced twice. Now, I could beat myself up over this or I could recognize that sometimes life happens and this project is supposed to be fun, not stressful. If I put too much pressure on myself, I will not keep playing keyboard after this project ends, which would defeat the purpose of learning.

Since its Oscar season, I had to learn another song from one of my favourite movies, La La Land. This is the only thing I did this week, I learnt it on Tuesday and practiced it a few times on Saturday. It was a lot of fun and a very chill week of keyboard.

Here is the song:

My schoolwork is calming down this week, so I hope I can do a little bit more practicing.

See you later!

This week, I chose to do something a little different with this project. I was curious to see if ChatGPT could write an accurate and beneficial weekly practice plan for the keyboard. To test this, I prompted Chat with “Write a weekly practice plan for a beginner keyboard player” and followed it all week (Monday to Friday).

This is what ChatGPT came up with:

Immediately, I noticed there were a few things Chat wanted me to practice that I do not usually focus on. For example, ear training is something I have not been working on. It was my least favourite part of music in high school, but I did work on it with it for the sake of the experiment.

Here is what I used for ear training:

I was not very successful the first time around, but I did enjoy that this video felt like a game. I also did not ear train every day, just on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I found it too time-consuming to do every day.

Since Chat wanted me to work on sightreading and music theory, I chose a piece written out rather than my usual YouTube video. I began by sightreading it on Monday and then practicing it for the rest of the week. I also broke it down the piece’s theory aspects to study.

Here is the piece I chose:

It is a really simple piece but in my defence, I have not had to read sheet music in a very long time and working on reading both clefs at once was enough of a challenge for this week.

As for technique, I continued working on my scales. This has been very helpful in getting quicker at following along with tutorials.

Overall, I think ChatGPT did a great job of covering every area of learning the keyboard. I really appreciated the reminder to rest when practising as I think many musicians forget this step. Since the plan required a lot of consistent practice, I do believe it helped me become a better keyboard player. This was a cool experiment!

See you next week!

Hey everybody!

Last week, I was away for my reading week and I did not bring the keyboard with me, unfortunately. So, a large chunk of this week was spent catching up and refreshing my brain. This has been a very chill process as I have kind of paused my goals and just messed around to get back into the rhythm of everything.

I decided I wanted to mess around with a new song that I had not tried yet and I chose what I consider to be a classic piano song: The Scientist by Coldplay (shoutout to all the Grey’s Anatomy fans). I was not very concerned with perfecting this song, I just wanted to get my hands moving and familiarize myself with playing with both hands at the same time.

Here is the song link:

Unfortunately, I caught a bug while travelling and have been unwell for most of the week so I did do much practicing. I ran through the song a few times and have messed around playing random melodies but that is about it. I am hoping to recover soon and jump right back into it!

Next week, I am revisiting my goals from before my holiday and resuming the usual programming of this blog.

Thanks for stopping by and see you soon!

This week, I continued to work on “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme” from La La Land, as well as, dove into the wonderful world of piano warmups.

Regarding La La Land, I have finally kept up with the piece at its normal speed. Goodbye to my days of 0.5 and 0.75 playback speed, hello Hollywood! Damien Chazelle, if you ever direct a La La Land sequel and you need a pianist, send me a message and I will be there.

For anyone who has missed it or wants to see it again, here is the link to the video I have been using:

Along with that, this week I really wanted to find a good warmup that would help me develop my basic skills. I have been neglecting any sort of warm-up for the past few weeks of learning, but I think having one could help develop my skills and create a better practice routine. After some searching, I found this document by Juilliard, a famous performing arts school based in New York City. The exercises are designed for beginners and due to my background playing other instruments, I had no trouble reading the music.

Here is the link:

https://courses.edx.org/asset-v1:JuilliardOpenClassroom+JCx002+2T2017+type@asset+block@Basic_Warm-Up_Guide.pdf

I mainly focused on getting comfortable with the C-Major Scale and I plan to look into the other scales next week. Practicing this scale has helped me develop new skills and sharpen old ones.

See you next time!

Welcome back!

As I said last week, my focus for this week was just working on Mia and Sebastian’s Theme from La La Land. By practicing it a few times this week, I was able to speed up the playback speed and was quicker with my transitions between notes and chords overall. I am having a lot of fun with this song!

Changing the playback speed on YouTube has been a lifesaver throughout my journey. In case you are unfamiliar with how to change it, I created a tutorial through a series of images:

First, you pause the video and click the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen.

Next, you click the section labelled “Playback Speed”.

Now, you can choose your playback speed! Everything above the “Normal” button/everything with a “0.” will slow your video down. Everything below the “Normal” button/everything with a “1.” will speed the video up. For practicing piano, I recommend slowing the song down.

For this practice session, I chose 0.75x!

In case anyone missed it last week, here’s the song I have been working on:

This upcoming week, I plan to start by working on this song, as well as, a new song!

Have a great week everybody!

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)!

Hello and welcome back!

This past week, I have been exploring learning the piano. I began by testing out what I could remember from the several times I have attempted to learn the keyboard. All I could remember was a C chord, which definitely humbled me, but I have since recovered. I was reminded of a time when I labelled the notes on a section of a piano when I was younger to help me remember where they were, thus I took green masking tape and a Sharpie to label my keyboard as such:

I found this to be very useful and would recommend it to other beginners.

To warm up, I simply messed around. I just wanted to have a little bit of fun.

I then decided I wanted to learn the song Exile by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver. This led me to search online for a tutorial and I landed on this one from Bitesize Piano:

I spent about an hour learning and practicing the song and I was very proud of my abilities. I was able to pause and slow down the video where necessary and I found the instructions easy to follow. I would say the video was beginner-friendly and perfect for people who are familiar with the basics of piano. I could actually tell what song I was supposed to be playing which was a big moment for me. I even FaceTimed my brother to show him my newfound passion for the keyboard and he gave me a solid 8/10, which is a win in my books.

Something I have yet to master and will continue to work on this week is playing different chords with my left vs right hand at the same time. I was definitely stumbling over this concept, but I am a beginner! I knew I would not immediately be able to play the piano like Beethoven (though I held out a little hope).

Materials/Set-up

I use a Necktar Impact LX49+ USB MIDI Keyboard and I plug it into my Macbook to use GarageBand. I received the keyboard for free from my mom’s coworker, thus I did zero research and am learning all the features as I go!

Here is a link to the keyboard for all those interested:

https://www.long-mcquade.com/74672/Keyboards/MIDI-Controllers-Interfaces/Nektar/Impact-LX49-USB-MIDI-Controller.htm

Thanks for tuning in this week and see you next week!