Music 30/30 – Day 1
Ok, trying out a slightly different format, considering that I’m drifting away from a tight coupling between the days of the Journey and the days of the individual challenges. It made sense to have a single heading for the drawing challenge, and the 3d challenge was just 30 days off, so easy enough, but having day 62 correlate properly with day 1 just seems like too much to ask. And I think including a separate section header for the challenges should help organize talking about other things. Like website design… oh, wait.
Regardless, I think the challenge is off to a good start. Like I said yesterday, the two main goals are to learn some basic composition and music theory skills, and to learn some basic novice level keyboard playing skills. To accomplish the latter without a direct teacher I’ve picked up yet another Udemy course, this time on a “surefire” way to learn to play the piano quickly. We’ll see how it turns out. But being a gamer and an all around crazy person, I’m of course pushing it to the next level. I’m actually three levels deep with this stuff, it’s insane.
So, what I’m doing is as follows. The course covers a series of increasingly difficult chord progressions and rhythms, as they apply to a variety of popular or at least semi-recognizable tunes. These often have sheet music attached, or at the very least the basic pattern will have sheet music, which can then be transposed for the listed chord progressions. The idea is that you practice practice practice the progressions as you are shown, and then move on into the next one, slowly building up your skill and general knowledge level.
From my other course on music theory I’ve been tuned into a software package called Musescore, which allows you to write out sheet music, and has the added benefit of being able to both play it back, and export the music as a midi file. This is great, because taking the time to enscribe each of the practice pieces gives me practice at both reading and writing musical notation and gets me more familiar with the piece itself.
The final piece of the puzzle is a program called Synthesia. It’s essentially a Rock Band / Guitar Hero style rhythm game designed for MIDI keyboards connected to your computer, but it has the advantage of being able to import any midi file, including the ones that I can output from Musescore. So while I *could* just sit and practice the exercise pieces on my own, instead I can load them up in the game, and get perfect and instant feedback on how well I am playing them, and where I’m messing up. Synthesia lets you practice the melody, the rhythm, and each hand individually until you are ready to play everything together at full speed, and you can track your progress over time.
So far I think I like the plan. I get to follow along with a prescribed course of study, I get multiple views into the song, practice at multiple levels, and quick feedback, all in one simple package. So today I managed to get my overall score on the first practice piece up to 59, which is not a bad start.