let there be music

8/6/2023

I have learned so much in the last two weeks! As I have been practicing and exploring online, I created a resource tracker to organize all of the places I visit. In this tracker, you will be able to see which resources have helped me the most and why!

My main sources for learning so far have been the Kala mobile app and Youtube. If you read my first blog from this project, you know that I will be learning to play the tune from Disney Pixar’s short film Lava (Murphy, 2014). The chords needed for that song are C, F, G7, and C7.

I knew I would need to learn those chords first so I turned to the Kala app. They have a “learn” tab with short videos that teach every chord. I found this system very useful and easy to navigate. Below I have embedded a few videos of myself learning these chords. I spent about an hour playing around and looking up tips on Reddit. 

I have now moved on from learning the chords to learning the song. I ran into a bit of trouble with the original video I was learning from. I could not keep up and didn’t understand why my playing sounded so different from the video. So, I turned back to Youtube and found a video by Katie DeNure that changed everything for me. DeNure walks through each chord AND the strum pattern. The strum pattern is the piece I was missing and really jumped my learning forward. I was reminded of a section in Bransford, Brown, and Cocking's book How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school  (2000) that discusses true understanding. They talk about how it is more than memorizing and usually takes more time. I had memorized the chords, but I did not understand the strumming and counting. Unlocking this understanding of the music allowed me to make the song sound right.