Switching Things Up

Hey guys,

Well I've decided change things up a little bit. I originally was going to try and play the song " Roads Untraveled" by Linkin Park. I printed out sheet music and everything because I thought that song would be a good "starter" song, but I quickly learned otherwise. When you listen to the song, it doesn't actually sound very hard because I just sounds like couple of chords. There are more than a couple of chords. After trying to play the song for about 2-3 weeks I learned about 3-4 lines on the first page. There are 3 pages. So I decided to talk to my mentor, Zach, about it. He looked over the sheet music and he said that this song was definitely not a beginner song. One song that he did suggest was "How To Save A Life" by The Fray. I've known this song for a long time but when picking a song to play I didn't even think to play it. For the past week or so I've been learning "How To Save A Life". This song is actually really easy and fun to play! I wouldn't be able to get my mentor to come and help me all the time to I decided that I would also try and look up some video tutorials on YouTube. I came across this guy, Joe Raciti. He has a YouTube channel that is just him either play video tutorials or piano covers for various songs. So I've been using this video to help me learn the chords for the song, along with the sheet music my mentor had given to me.

I really enjoy using this video to help me learn the song. I actually like it better than using sheet music because with sheet music you can't see exactly what's going on with your hands, so using a video is so much easier than trying to figure out how to read sheet music. As I beginner I still am finding it a little more difficult to read sheet music easily. That is definitely something that I am going to need to work on. But, I feel that because I changed the song I am learning, this project is going to get going so much better!

Time to start

Hey guys,
Well I guess I've officially started my project. I've started to sit down at my piano and try to figure out some basic songs from some old piano books I still have lying around. I've actually lost a lot more skill than I thought. I've decided as my first song, I'm going to play "Roads Untraveled" by Linkin Park. I chose this song because it's a decently easy song to play on piano so I might as well give it a try! I printed off some sheet music off this website to get myself started. Once I had sat down to try and play it, (thinking it wouldn't be all that hard) I literally had no idea what I was doing. This wasn't exactly what I was hoping to happen, but I guess I'll just have to try and figure something out as to how to read the music.The thing that I'm finding the hardest part is to read the music when it's off of the staff (the 5 lines that the notes are on). I'm probably going to meet with my mentor soon just to get a little more insight as to how I'm going to play the song. I've also done some research on what is the best free video editing software that I'll use to edit my videos. A couple websites said that Lightworks was the best free video editing software, so downloaded it. Just having a glance at it, this software looks very confusing to use. The good thing is that they have a very helpful website where I should be able to get the help that I need. Well hopefully things are going to change these next couple weeks so that I'm able to get my project going!

Shaking off the Dust

Hey, everyone name is Braden and I am a grade 12 student. At school my teacher gave us this project called a passion project. Basically a passion project is a project about something you enjoy doing or something that you think you'd enjoy doing. Throughout this project you have to make progress and have a goal for the end of this semester. At first I had no idea what I was going to do. Last year we had to do another passion project. I decided to do a project on Minecraft. I did the project with a friend of mine. I had a really fun time doing the project last year and was wanting to have the same amount of fun doing it this year. After a while of thinking I thought that I'd try re-learning how to play piano. I used to play piano when I was around 7. I really didn't like taking lessons because my parents basically made me do it. When I was about 13 I decided that I wanted to play the drums. So I took lessons until I was 16. I really enjoy playing drums, and still play them quite often to this day. After playing drums for a couple years I've really started to appreciate music a lot more than I did before I took drum lessons. Anyways, my plan for this project is to re-learn piano, but that's not all. I also want to learn how to edit videos using a video editor. So I mashed these two ideas together. My plan is to get some more knowledge of piano, then to learn a couple of songs. Once I've learned those songs, I'll record myself one of them. Then I'll learn than song on drums also. After I've recorded both me playing piano and drums I'll edit them together. I think this will be a fun project but it will also be difficult. I think the part that will be the most difficult will be finding time to do this. Trying to learn songs on the piano will take me some time and I hope that I'll be able to remember the knowledge that I learned 10 years ago. I hope you stick around and join me on this journey!