Upon first being presented with the idea of a learning project my initial thoughts where how cool it would be to lean to play an instrument like guitar. I quickly ran myself through a reality check though, reminding myself how unmusical I actually am, and that learning a new instrument would take up a lot of time in my already jam-packed semester. I started to think of other things that peaked my interest that I could learn. There was yoga, but I felt that it wouldn’t be exciting enough for me to carry on doing for four months. I could lean a new language, but my excitement drained as soon as I entered my English 100 class and realized I should probably study up more on my first language for now.

I kept running through different project ideas for the next week. Each project I considered though just didn’t peak my interest enough to want to make me pursue it for a whole semester. Finally, I settled on a project due to what I consider to be a sign from the universe. After catching a movie one night at the theatre I got up to realize I was sitting on a guitar pick the whole time! despite my limited knowledge of instruments, other than grade 5 band in which I played (quite poorly) the tenner saxophone, I felt I had no choice but to take up my original idea. Now I just had to track down a guitar.

My uncle Kirk was nice enough to entrust my clumsy fingers with his old acoustic guitar for the semester. He tuned it, packed it into a gig bag and gave me some advice on simple songs and chords to start out learning on. I did some research on my own as well on the best ways to learn acoustic guitar and settled on an app called Yousician. Yousician acts as a musical tutor for ukulele, vocals, piano, or bass. I’ve found it very helpful so far. It starts out with super basic skills that you must successfully learn before being able to access the next level. Ill also supplement this with guided YouTube video tutorials and a few lessons when needed. To reach my goals I’ve decided to allocate one hour a day five times a week to practicing using these platforms or others that I find along the way.

I’ve went through my playlists and have picked out a couple songs that I thought would be fun to learn and that are long time favourites of mine. I also went ahead and googled some beginner songs that I knew would be easier than some of my choices. I made a YouTube playlist highlighting all my choices. There are about 20 songs in the playlist, and it grows daily but I hope to be able to play three to five by the end of the semester. Most of the YouTube videos I’ve watched have suggested that playing songs is an attainable goal at about the four to six month mark depending on the amount of practice being done. This doesn’t leave me a lot of time to achieve this goal, but here’s hoping!

Thank you Uncle Kirk!