en lieu de
in lieu of doing more pressing school work, i will update my journal here for my learning project!
on thursday afternoon, my appointed guitar practice time, i sat down in front of the computer with the web site recommended to me by MegB. the most useful part was the suggested strums for the chorus and the verses. the chords themselves werent too difficult, but i was having trouble getting the rhythm right.
i started with the four basic chords for the chorus, and the suggested chorus strum. instead of playing the “actual” chorus, i just played those four chords over and over again until my fingers were making the chord changes more smoothly and my right hand was strumming the rhythm correctly. this kind of repetitive practice drill was very skinnerian in terms of the learning theories weve studied in class.
after i felt more confident about the chorus, i moved on to some of the verses. was having difficulty changing chords in the middle of a strum-measure. i slowed it down to try and figure out what was going on with my hands until i finally got what was wrong: when my left hand changed chords, my right hand stopped moving. if my right hand stopped moving, my strumming rhythm was completely off.
this is a new obstacle for me in terms of learning to play instruments. all of my previous instruments were wind instruments, so most of the difficulty came in learning the different embouchure for each, and differences in how to articulate the notes with my tongue. fingerings were never a problem because i would either use only one hand (trumpet) or both hands moved at the same time to play one note (clarinet, sax). playing guitar is the first time that ive had to make each hand do something separately, but together.
to me this sounds a lot like the assimilation and accomodation models that piaget talked about.
anyway, im so happy that MegB responded to my previous post about my frustration with my guitar practice. it makes me feel like im part of a learning community out here in the wild, wild internet. rather vygotsky-an, mind in society. i really appreciate the help!
See more progress on: learn to play american pie on guitar