Hi! Welcome to the 3rd In-Depth Blog Post!
Regarding Direct Quotes and Recording
I found that when I was taking notes or direct quotes, I felt bad as he was talking and I wasn’t really paying attention while writing. Sorry for the lack of quotes in this post. I am going to work on recording our meetings if I can figure out how to.
Progress Report
This week (or past two weeks), I learned a lot about actually playing the bass guitar! Since my last meeting mishap where I had neglected to remind my mentor about the meeting until the day of, I had learned to confirm the meeting a few days beforehand. I made sure to set a timer on my phone so that every Wednesday I would confirm that we were meeting On Sunday at 5:00pm. I had a meeting with my mentor and had prepared a few questions and conversation points in my In-Depth notebook. (I felt like I was extremely unprepared for our last meeting, so I tried to make up for it my preparing well). One of the topics that I wanted to ask him about was how we should progress forward. I had asked a few friends who were experienced in learning guitar how they went about learning their instrument. I found out that many of them learned by playing songs, while others had learned scales and arpeggios first. With this information, I thought it would be useful to ask Tito Paul how he thinks we should continue. He responded saying he thought it would be pretty useful learning arpeggios and scales before learning songs. Which we did. He actually told me that he learned more about arpeggios so that he could teach me about them better (which was very nice of him). He taught me A major arpeggios, D Major arpeggio and G Major arpeggio (which is what I play in order in the video below). After that, we talked about the do re mi kind of scales, in this case, major. He told me once I got faster at the arpeggios, we could start the do re mi scale next week. We ran into a few problems where zoom was cancelling out the sound of my bass and Tito Paul couldn’t hear it. But other than that, it was a good meeting! Throughout the week I tried my best to practice my arpeggios, getting faster each time. I did have a piano recital last weekend, so I wasn’t able to practice as I was spending time getting ready for the recital. In the video below, I start with an exercise to get faster at moving in-between notes, and then practice my arpeggios mentioned above.
Video
How to Have a Beautiful Mind – Edward De Bono
This year for In-Depth, we’re using the book “How to Have a Beautiful Mind” by Edward De Bono to guide us through the project. The book talks about how to have a beautiful mind (as the title explains) and how to have beautiful conversation with others. Over the course of a few weeks, we’ll learn about the skills talked about in the book and apply them to our In-Depth project. This week we read chapters four to five.
Chapter Four
In Chapter Four of how to have a Beautiful Mind, De Bono talks about being interesting. When I first read the title, it shocked me a bit, how and why should you be more interesting? But when I read through the chapter, it began to make sense. One of the points was to talk about your interests with another person (in this case, my In-Depth topic). This brought a quote into mind from one of my meetings with my mentor: “So, why did you choose Bass guitar as your topic for the project?” “Oh, well, I had heard the bass guitar in songs a lot and I really liked the deep and steady sound of it. Plus, I had tried playing it in grade 6 once and wanted to try again.” “Oh yeah? Cool”. I had actually practiced this answer before after doing the learning contract, so I was prepared when Tito Paul asked. It can also be hard sometimes to articulate how I feel about a topic I’m passionate about. Another one of the points made in this chapter was about ‘what if’ statements. It talks about how ‘what if’ statements cause ideas to sprout from the statement. I tried this when he was explaining arpeggios and how you go down a string to get the next arpeggio. I then wondered (and asked) what if you run out of strings at the bottom? How do you get to the next arpeggio? While this what if statement is not quite an interesting as ‘what if pigs could fly’, it sparked a whole other discussion about what you should do and how you should move to get to the next arpeggio so that you don’t run out of strings. That was how I learned that you keep the same finger pattern no matter the arpeggio key (major).
Chapter Five
In Chapter Five, we discuss and further build upon the goals of a conversation. This time we also talk about how to respond in a conversation. One of the points made about responding was supporting a point someone makes by using evidence or extra information. It reminded me of when we were in the meeting and my mentor said something about arpeggios being the notes of a triad plus the root on top again. He asked if that made sense and I said yes and supported his point by saying the notes of an A major triad were a, c# and e and we discussed together how the specific notes made up the arpeggio. Another point made about responding during conversation was about sharing a personal story that would relate and illustrate the topic at hand. I used this when we were talking about procrastination during practicing. I went on to mention how I used to (and sometimes still do) procrastinate on homework and would often set timers or reminders to remind myself. This lead to the timers I have set now to remind myself to practice and ask about meeting times. By bringing up a personal story, I was able to use that and improve the situation and topic being discussed, which I thought was really interesting.