As you can tell I haven’t been very good at keeping up with writing again this year. Even when I have an idea or topic to write about. I have been finding it a little frustrating. However, I just realized some of why I haven’t been getting as much written and I may have a solution, or at least one I’m going to try.
With being home so much and not getting out and about as well as not getting a lot of art, of any kind done lately, I don’t usually have a lot of new pictures to include with my post. I like to include the pictures to break things up. However, there is the prep work for the pictures that I don’t always like to do. The pictures are a thing for me, especially when they aren’t specific to the topic of the post. My solution involves less pictures unless relevant. That does mean you may see posts without pictures. I’ll try to keep those shorter since reading all text on a screen isn’t always ideal.
And as with today’s topic, sometimes there really aren’t pictures to share without making something up.
What I wanted to share was how much fun I had working on the songs for a Children’s Songs for Guitar course through Udemy. No really, it was a blast. It sounds like it’s really simple and basically it is. The key to the course that made me want to do it to begin with is that all of the songs are in G major and they are all played within the G major scale. When I first started the course, my first thought was ‘Crap, I don’t know the major scale’. Yeah, so off I go to find a diagram of the G major scale. And lucky me, I was able to find one with all the different positions, much like the pentatonic scales I have dealt with. Cool!
The great thing about learning these songs in the G major scale is that I now also know better how to change their key. Just like changing the key for a blues song. What I found even more interesting, and fun was playing the songs in a different key and hearing how it changed the feel of the song. Like ‘Amazing Grace’. Playing it in G sounds ok but it doesn’t have a lot of life. Move it up to B or B-flat and you have a whole different story.
I have finished the course and intend to use what I learned about the G major scale to practice moving the scale patterns to the different keys and getting some comfort with that. It should enhance my soloing skills as well as my playing overall. As part of that I expect to be playing many of those songs in the different keys, just for exercise. At least, that is and was the plan.
And then my plan got knocked off its rails. I was merrily going along practicing my new scales and songs and I started another course, that I tried to work on last year, Christmas songs, I also started a beginning piano course. You might think this is what knocked my plan off its rails. It isn’t. It was two things that killed the momentum. First was a long and stressful week at work that left me little energy for much at the end of the day. And, more significantly, I added both the Christmas songs course and the piano course to my ‘To Do’ list and completely lost interest in doing either.
Yes, I know that is pretty messed up. I think what happens is when I see them on the list, I then see them as either I ‘have to do them’, or they are the only things I can be working on. It really takes all the fun and joy out of them when I put them on the list because, now they are chores.
I am a fan of the list in general for helping me to not forget things I want to do but that are not pressing and allowing me to then clear them out of my head so that I have space for what I really need to think about. However, it seems that, for me, it is not always helpful.
This is the first week I have taken the guitar and piano off the ‘To Do’ list. It will be interesting to see if that helps and how soon I make the time again for one, or both, of the courses.
And now that I have a different approach to my posts, I might get posts up a little more frequently again. I already have an idea for at least the next post. That’s always a good start.