Welp, Cody here and it is my last post for my learning project series that followed me trying different technology while trying to learn guitar. Before starting this assignment, I had never played guitar in my life, despite spending much of my 20s hanging out with bands and musicians. I have always been keen to learn new things and often dive in head first. I aspired to learn one song and to sing it while I played. I picked All Apologies by
Nirvana because it is one of my all-time favorite songs. I would say I was fairly successful, furthermore, I owe that success to the technology I used. If I had to go to guitar lessons it would have been nearly impossible because with a wife and two kids, my time is a valuable resource. With the tech, I was able to practice like 10 minutes a day. Another interesting observation is that despite performing as a juggler on stage in big rooms of 500+ people, I still got stage fright and felt self-conscious posting these videos. I think it is because my act on stage was super polished, but my guitar playing is still in its infant stage. You will find below my last recorded video of me playing and singing (for the first time ever) and then following that will be a week-by-week summary of my journey. **Please consider the above writing and the below video to be my 10th post.**
Week 1 Bassline Blog Post
As I read through my first post I realized that I did not stick to my practice plan of an hour every Wednesday while my daughter was at Girl Guides. Instead i went with a goal of 10 minutes a day, which was a lot easier to implement. Instead of taking a break from studies to doom scroll, I would pull out my axe and practice chords.
Week 2 Guitar Hero(In Training)
This week I tried my first app that is called Simply Guitar and as it turned out this ended up being my favorite app of all the different ones that I tried. I was bummed that there was a pay wall, however I now see that this app will be worth it. I very rarely pay for apps, but like programmers are people too, right?
Week 3 Yousician More Like (Lose)ician
This week I tried another new app called yousician and I hated it. There were so many things I didn’t like. My biggest beef was that there pay wall was sneaky and hard to get around to just try the app. The app also felt like a video game, which as Dallas commented that he though this was a good thing. So I guess I learned that there are different strokes for different folks.
Week 4 Come Do a Flip with me
For this week I tried a new app called Flip App. The thing I like the most about this app is that you can keep the videos within your classroom, unlike with YouTube where things can end up in the world wide web. Here is the video I created.
Week 5 Canadian Idol, Cody Edition
So this was the first week that I actually tried playing the song that I wanted to. I used YouTube to find the a beginner instructor . The video was great and really got me going in the right direction. It was also my first time playing power chords, and they are AWESOME.
Week 6 This Week I Got Zucced
This week I used social media (Facebook) to crowd source some YouTubers for me to try. I picked Marty’s Music as it was recommended by several of my friends. I enjoyed his channel there were a lot of great videos. He was easy to listen to, and presented the information in a easy to digest way.
Week 7 An Audio Progress Report(For Posterity)
This week i tried an app called moises . It is a great app designed for musicians for recording music, tracking it and editing it. I found it to be very user friendly, I then posted my work to new ground here.
Week 7 Playing Through the Hurt
This was a rough week for me. My mental health was in the dumps. So I decided to just record myself playing and practicing. Not really much else to say about this week.
Week 8 Trying to Effect My Sound
This week I played around with an app called Tonebridge Guitar Effects. It is a super cool app that allowed me to some neat effects with my guitar. My major complaint with this app was the latency between my strumming and the sounds coming out.
Week 9 The Fender App
I sadly couldn’t come up with a catchy title. However I think that the name Fender may catch someone’s attention. The app was not very good. I really do not see the difference between it and YouTube, because it was just videos. Here is my video talking about it.
In conclusion, as cliché as it sounds, I truly enjoyed the journey not focused on the destination. I think that far to often I our capitalist society, we are to focused on getting the thing. I prefer chasing the carrot as opposed to actually eating it. I think guitar is great for this because i will never master the guitar. It is impossible to know EVERYTHING about or on an instrument, and in this knowledge I find solace. I think it will also bring me and my 12 year old daughter closer, as she wants me to get a bass so we can jam. I am feeling tingly all over as I write this and my heart is beating through my chest, so I know that I am on a good path here.
In the words of Neil Young “Keep on rocking in the free world”
Cody Selanders
