My skill and why I chose it:

The skill I have chosen to learn for my in-depth project this year is how to play guitar. I have wanted to learn how to play the guitar for a long time now, but have never truly found the motivation to do so until now. The reason that I chose guitar is that I have always been raised in a household that treasures music, both playing and listening to it. My dad has played guitar for a very long time and he owns multiple guitars, so I have always been exposed to this skill, and it has become something that interests me and that I think would be rewarding to learn and know. I think that being able to play songs and melodies on the guitar for myself and others will be an ability that I enjoy and cherish for a very long time and will just be a lot of fun. Also, I think that being able to play will bring me closer to my dad, as it will allow us to play together and bond over our shared knowledge, which is an experience that would be very valuable to me. I am very excited to learn guitar over the course of this project and to hopefully walk away from it with at least a few meaningful skills.

What I am going to learn:

Playing guitar is a very layered and complicated skill to learn, meaning it has many sub-skills to learn, as well as music theory, both guitar-related and overarching. By the end of this project, I hope to be able to pick a song, find and read its guitar tablature, and play what I read on a guitar. Very simple, this will include knowing how to read tablature, how to form and play an array of minor and major chords and how to play multiple different strumming patterns. But beyond that, I will also learn about the fretboard of a guitar and how it relates to music theory, how to tune a guitar, arpeggios, and scale shapes. I also hope to improve enough throughout this project that I will be able to learn more advanced techniques like fingerpicking, hammer-ons, and some 7 chords (type not the number). But aside from tangible skills, it is also very important that I learn music theory as I progress, as it is the reasoning behind the music and the baseline that I will use to understand what I am learning better. These will all be part of my journey of learning how to play the guitar and I think it will be very fun and interesting to see how all of this comes together and applies to my playing.

My mentor:

The man that has agreed to mentor me for this project is very knowledgeable in the subject of guitar, having played guitar for forty years and taught guitar for ten of those. He also graduated from the Musicians Institute of Technology. He still plays actively in his field and plays local guitar gigs, which shows that his knowledge on the subject is still very fresh and he even understands at least the more local music performing environment. I was fortunate enough to get his contact info from my parents, as he is an old friend of theirs. This meant that I was able to get more experience connecting and reaching out to someone new for help, but I also didn’t have the largest struggle finding a mentor other than the minor difficulties of miscommunication and late responses from time to time. He has many years of current experience as well as formal training, and I am very excited to be learning from him about how to play the guitar.