3/26 Blog #1 The Beginning!

    I am very excited for the project to kick-off! I have always wanted to learn an instrument from a young age and now is a perfect time to use my keyboard which I have not touched in YEARS. Maybe quarantine will actually be a good thing for once!

    Over the first week, I have learned a lot. I was able to locate and identify the different notes on a keyboard. The white key to the left of the two black keys plays a C note. The white keys then go from C up to G, then cycles back to A and repeats. It was confusing at first, but I got it down.

    Next, I learned about the black keys on the keyboard. They play flats and sharps. If the black key is lower than the note played before, it would be flat. For example, if you played a G note and hit the black key to its left, it would be G flat. It is a semitone, or a half-step, lower. Likewise, if the note is a half-step higher, it will be labeled as sharp and be to the right of the note played before.

    Finally, it was time to start playing something on the keyboard. I learned some basic chords: C major, F major, G major, and A minor; if neither major nor minor were said after the chord, it is assumed to be major. I followed a YouTube video for this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=827jmswqnEA). When playing these chords, your right hand plays 3 notes whilst your left hand plays a bass note. After practicing each individual chord, it was time to play them in a sequence. This was much trickier than I had anticipated. Getting only certain fingers to move and press on the keys proved to be a challenge but after some practice, I was able to play the chords one after another with relative consistency.

    Playing the piano also helps with the coordination of the limbs and every major part of the central nervous system (“Bimanual Labor: the Neuroscience of Piano Playing” and “Playing an Instrument: Better for Your Brain than Just Listening”). This gave me the motivation to keep on trying to play the chords.

                          

    This timeline provides a rough outline of what I will be doing over the next few weeks. Thanks to technology, I will continue to use various online resources to learn the keyboard. For courses, I will likely use free Udemy classes. I will begin to use Simply Piano to practice playing and reading music. 

    Comparing my progress to my timeline, I think I am off to a good start! Hopefully, I will be able to accomplish my goal of playing “Sweden” by C418 by the end of this project along with a few other songs. Next up: learning to read music.

I have commented on Ethan Smith's, Tiffany Liu's, and Sam Silverman's blogs.

Citations

“Bimanual Labor: the Neuroscience of Piano Playing.” Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 23 June 2017, neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/bimanual-labor-neuroscience-piano-playing.

“Playing an Instrument: Better for Your Brain than Just Listening.” Penn Medicine, www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-blog/2017/january/playing-an-instrument-better-for-your-brain-than-just-listening.