Thank you for following me along this journey. I have to say I am a little nervous about sharing this post because I have tried to play a full song and sing. Usually I need a little special encouragement to get up and sing and it is almost always with the karaoke machine helping me out. So putting myself out on the internet is a bit scary.

First I need to tell the story regarding this post. Nothing can ever be easy haha. The song I chose is In Color by Jamey Johnson and you can play it using a number of different strumming patterns ranging from quite easy to difficult (for me), or you can pick the string. I had been practicing to play this song with the basic strumming pattern because that is where I am at, especially when you add signing. As I am practicing the song one last time before I record it I break my bottom string. If you look close in the video you will count 5 strings. So I experimented and it didn’t sound good so I decided to try picking. I hadn’t tried the picking yet, I just assumed it would be harder. The good thing about the picking was that I didn’t need the bottom string. So this version of the song I learned in about an hour, that is the one thing that I can say I am proud of through this process. It is still nothing fantastic but I was happy with how I was able to adjust. Here is my video, please don’t judge too harshly.

I have added my original lesson as a comparison. The videos are completely different skills but I think it is safe to say that I couldn’t do this in January.

One unfortunate thing was that my daughter kind of fell off the map with this but she became too busy and I didn’t want to overload her. Hopefully she will try it again this summer when we have some free time.

What did this project teach me?

When this project started I had never blogged before, I had never made a video before (I know, hard to believe), and I hadn’t played the guitar in 30 years. I learned a lot.

For my skill of learning the guitar I mainly used YouTube, like this video that I quickly used today.

I did however move away from videos as I went and started to go old school with some Chord Charts that I found helped me because I could slow down the timing and then speed it up once I got the hang of the chords and strumming or picking.

My tech skills including video making and blogging have really evolved. Even if my videos are still boring, I have learned a lot about making them and I have become much quicker at producing them which is a nice relief from my first attempts at editing. I also feel like this project forced me to want to make my blogs engaging. Yes I know this is a long one with a lot of writing but I think most of them were funish. In doing this I learned a lot about creating memes, and adding videos, pictures, and presentations.

The last thing that I now need to learn is how to re-string a guitar. Thank you for following my journey, I hope you enjoyed it.