Final In-Depth Project

Hello there, welcome to my blog!

My name is Myung Joon (or MJ) and I’m currently a grade 9 in the TALONS program.

For the past few months, I have been working on learning a new skill with a help of a mentor, and for this, I have chosen to learn how to play the trumpet.

With the help of my mentor, Daniel Kwong, I have managed to develop this skill in a matter of months, and below you will find a video that I have prepared for today. Go ahead and watch it, and I hope you enjoy it!

(I suggest turning your volume down a ton if you don’t want your ears blown out.)

The bestest video ever

Thank you so much for watching the video, and just sticking through the video. Don’t forget to comment below if you have any comments or questions, and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my abilities.

In Depth Post #6

We’re finally near the end. Looking back now, it’s been a pretty long process with a lot of learning involved. My mentor has been with me the entire way and has helped me develop this new skill. Learning the trumpet has been a blast so far. I’ve enjoyed almost every step of this journey learning new songs, and just simply playing music. In fact, I’ve started to think about what I was going to do with this new skill in the future. There are a lot of new songs that I want to play, so maybe I might learn those for fun in the near future. I just really hope that I don’t end up dropping this skill entirely as it’s taken quite some time to develop and has simply been very enjoyable. Music is something that I really enjoy and value, so learning this new skill has helped me enjoy it even more.

Since the last blog post, I don’t think anything drastic has changed. I’m still playing every chance I get, and I haven’t gotten any new high notes quite yet. However, if I had to pinpoint one improvement, I would say that it’s the sound of the trumpet. My mentor has mentioned this to me as well, but I really think that the sound that I’m able to produce is now a lot louder, and more clear. My embouchure has developed to a point where I’m able to produce a nicer, sound without having to strain my muscles too much at all. I’ve also started to develop some articulation with my mentor as this is an important part learning new pieces. For example, I’ve learned how to produce a pretty solid staccato for some of the pieces I’m currently learning.

Overall, I think my meeting with my mentor are going pretty well. We tend to discuss a lot of casual things like events that have happened during our weeks, or exciting news we have heard. But after our friendly banter, we always get into the learning portion for a solid hour or so. I still wish that I could meet with him face to face so that he could listen to my playing more clearly, but that’s still not an option we currently have. However, I don’t seem to be facing any other problems with our meetings online. There’s not too much lag, or glitches, and he’s still about to see my face well enough to be able to give me pointers about my embouchure. So, I think it’s not too bad just yet.

In terms of my presentation for my In Depth night, I’m thinking of making a video of me playing the piece that I was teasing about in my last blog post. I’m still not going to give you a name or a title, but there is a clip of the piece below. I’ve made a backtrack for the piece a while back, so I’m simply going to edit my playing over the backtrack for the video. I may make a compilation for the recordings as well, but I’m afraid it might come out too long. But I’m sure future me can take care of the editing for that.

Here are the recordings from the past two weeks. The first one is a piece that I’ve just been learning in my free time, while the second is the sneak peek at my final video.

May 2

May 9

 

Again, I would like to thank my mentor for giving up his time to mentor me, and for being a wonderful teacher all around. I really couldn’t have done this without his help. I appreciate all of the support, and kindness that he has shown me, and I hope I can show him that it was all worth it in the end. And I guess this is the last casual blog post before the real thing, so I guess I’ll say some of my final remarks here. It really has been an enjoyable journey, and I had a ton of fun doing this through half of the year. This is probably the most fun I’ve had with any project and I really hope that I can have the same amount of fun next year as well. Once again, thank you to my mentor, Mr. Kwong for all of your hard work, and thank you for reading my blog posts.

Signing out,

~MJ

Plus Ultra, Go Further Beyond.

My Ecological Footprint

The Plan

So after filling out the Ecological Footprint Calculator, I have found that i currently have an ecological footprint of 6.45 hectares. But with nothing to compare my results with, I had to idea what this meant. So I did a quick google search to find that the average Canadian in 2019 has an ecological footprint that is about 7.5 hectares. After seeing this, I was pretty happy with myself. Considering that the quarantine had cut down my transportation score, I assumed that my score was around average.

It turns out that many people had scores that are around 8.5 hectares. A few people had scores that are either drastically over, or under 8.5 hectares, but from what I’ve heard, it seems that 8.5 is the rough average of the class. For example, one of the first people I have compared scores with was Derek. He had a score of 8.95 So my score seems to be well under the class average. Except this time, I guess it’s a good thing.

Although I have a low score, I do have a few actions that increases my footprint by a lot. In fact, I think that the reason I have a low score is not because I avoid actions that increase my footprint, but because I do a lot of actions that decrease it. So a lot of the more heavy hitting actions include: buying new clothing, eating a lot of non-organic beef, spending a lot of time on my computer, flushing my toilet every time, eating a lot of dairy products, showing for 3-6 minutes, owning a medium sized car, producing a cup of garbage on a daily basis, eating farmed fish as part of my diet, and eating wild fish as part of my diet.

From these actions, I don’t actually have many choices that I can try to change in such a short amount of time. For example, I don’t think going vegetarian right now, especially during the virus would be a very good decision for me at the moment. I don’t want to burden my mom, who cooks our food, with having to make certain vegetarian meals just for me. I also can’t do anything about owning a medium sized car and I don’t think I’ll need to buy any clothing for the time being, so I’ll have to choose one more action that isn’t on the list. So for the changes that I would like to apply, I’m choosing to do the following:

  1. I’m going to try to cut down my time on the computer. Although I already know as a fact that cutting down my screen time to only an hour is near impossible, I’m still going to try to cut it down as much as possible. Not only for the environment, but also for myself. I think it’ll be a good change that can give me a bit more time to do other things like reading.
  2. Although I really don’t like the idea of it, I’m going to try “letting the yellow mellow”.  I really don’t want to do this as it sounds really gross, but I really don’t have any other choices. My score is already really low, so in order to get it even lower, I’m going to have to try new things. So here we go.
  3. I’m also going to try avoiding dairy products for the time being. I eat a lot of dairy products like milk and yogurt, so I think this would be a good change for me. I’ve seen a lot of different documentaries and videos on the milk industry, so I know a lot of the consequences of drinking milk. So maybe I’ll try it out for a little while.
  4. Then I’m also going to try shortening my showers even more. I know as a fact that cutting down my shower time to 2 minutes is possible, so I’m going to try to make that time more consistent.
  5. Finally, I’m going to reduce the amount of trash from a cup to almost nothing. A majority of my trash are single use items, so I’m planning on using different, multi use items to reduce garbage. To be honest, I only chose this because it seems like the easiest for me to do out of the countless other choices. But since I already have other really difficult ones to try, I think this is a pretty good choice.

The Reflection

I think that the easiest changes were definitely numbers 4 and 5. I have relatively short hair to begin with, so showering in less than 2 minutes isn’t too difficult for me to do. I also realised that most of my time in the shower was actually spent just standing there thinking, or waiting for the water to warm up, so when I my main focus was to shower as quickly as a could, my time was easily shortened to 2 minutes. However, the biggest challenge that came up when trying to shower under 2 minutes was, as I mentioned earlier, waiting for the water to warm up. I sometimes had to enter when the water was still cold, in order to make sure the amount of time the water was on for was under 2 minutes.

When I was reducing the amount of garbage I used, I found that most of the garbage I make are either yogurt containers, or wrappers. And since I’m already avoiding yogurt because of my third change, all I had to do was to avoid eating candy and other packaged snacks. But since I already don’t eat sweets often, reducing the amount to zero was not all to hard.

Then, the more difficult changes were the rest of the remaining changes, 1, 2, and 3. As I thought, reducing my daily screen time to less than an hour was basically impossible, especially considering the situation we’re in right now. Even just the time I spend doing homework is over an hour, so this was probably not a good choice to start with. I ended up setting limits on the time I spent on Youtube, and this drastically reduced my screen time. I did ended up reducing my screen time by almost 3 hours each day from simply limiting Youtube. So, I instead started to play card games with my siblings during my free time.

Now, the hardest change for me was to let the “yellow mellow”. I was very hesitant to do this at first, and always just instinctively flushed the toilet right away. So when I finally got myself to do this after several days have passed, I realized that it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t leave anything for too long, so there were almost no short term negative consequences. There may be many long term effects, but I didn’t do it long enough to experience them just yet. So in the end, the only obstacle that was blocking me from doing this, was myself.

Finally, avoiding dairy products was yet another difficult change that I had to make. The reason this was so hard was because my first choice of drink and snack are milk and yogurt. I’m usually the one person in my household who single handedly eats all of the dairy products in the house. So avoiding dairy products was quite difficult. But overall, I ended up solving the problem with 2 steps, simply not eating snacks, and drinking more water. The first step doesn’t really need an explanation. I just stopped eating snacks and ate more during meal times to avoid the temptation as a whole. Then for the second step, I actually got myself a water bottle to drink from in my room. Since I’m a lazy person in general, I decided to make water the most convenient drink for me to get in order to stop myself from drinking milk. This actually did work, and not only did I reduce my ecological footprint and save my parents a few bucks from grocery shopping, I also got myself to drink more water.

Overall, not only did these changes help to reduce my ecological footprint, but some of these changes also helped to benefit me. So I’m actually considering on keeping a few of these changes permanent. I’m probably going to keep having really short showers and spent the extra 3 minutes that I save doing something else instead. I’m also definitely going to keep the water bottle in my room so that I drink water more often. But I’m probably not going to continue the rest because the strategies I used to help with the changes were all very temporary strategies that I used just for the time being. Maybe in the future after the situation’s over, I may make more changes that I couldn’t during the quarantine like transportation. For the time being though, I think my ecological is almost the smallest it can be without having to make any huge changes to my lifestyle.

In-Depth Blog Post #5

Wow, upon starting this post, I’ve just realized how far I’ve come in terms of my In-Depth. My mentor, Mr. Kwong has helped guide me along with journey, and I’ve been having fun the entire way through. Even though we’re all stuck at home because of the current situation outside, my mentor and I are still continuing to meet through teams video calls every week. It would be better if we could meet in person, but this is the best we can do for now. I’m still continuing to practice nearly every day due to the large amounts of free time I have.

I’ve also thought of a new, very exciting project that I have yet to talk to my mentor about. I’ve chosen a new song to learn and I’m really excited to get started on it. I’m not going to reveal what song I’m trying to learn just yet, and you don’t get any points for guessing correctly. But it’s a song that I really enjoy listening to as it’s catchy and has a very happy vibe to it. It always gets me in a good mood whenever I listen to it.

But so far, I have been working on developing a better quality sound with the help of my mentor. Playing a sound that’s nice to listen to is actually a lot of hard work. There are a lot of factors that come into play. You need a nice and sturdy embouchure that won’t give out, as well as a good balance of air compression and air speed to produce a high note that doesn’t end up screeching in your ear. My mentor has also taught me a few more warm up techniques that are actually very beneficial to my practices. If you want to take a look at one of them, you can listen to the recording for April 4th.

We only have 2 recordings this time, since it has only been 2 weeks since the last blog post. But unfortunately, I’m not playing any music in either one. The first displays a new warm up technique that I learned, and the second is just a clip of trumpet maintenance. I really don’t have any new music to show apart from the one that I’m trying to keep a secret for now, so I hope you aren’t too disappointed. But if you are, I promise that the next blog post will actually have me playing music!

Recordings:

April 4

April 11

1. What kinds of learning opportunities does the mentor provide to expose you to new learning?

My mentor actually provides me with a ton a different resources for me to use during my own practice time so that I continue to have a general idea of what my goal is even without him there. So for example, he has recommended many professional trumpet players to listen to while practicing so that I know what kind of sound to strive for. If I have no idea what kind of sound is needed or ideal, then I won’t really have any goals to achieve. He has also been so kind as to provide me with a beginner band book or the trumpet. It’s been a huge help when developing technique as it contains a few simple tunes to play, as well as many technical exercises to practice with.

2. What kinds of learning opportunities exist to reinforce new learning?

There are a lot of very good trumpet tutorials out there that are made by professional trumpet players. But, many players have different ways of teaching and can help me to further understand the different techniques for trumpet playing.

3. What kinds of opportunities exist that might accelerate learning?

Especially during our current situation, I think what would really help to accelerate my learning is some live trumpet playing that I can base my playing off of. Currently, the only playing that I can base my own playing on are all recordings of people playing trumpet. However, this is not actually the same as listening to a live trumpet. There may be background noise, static, or bad microphones that may change and alter the sound of the trumpet, so the pure sound of an unaltered trumpet would be quite beneficial for me at the moment.

4. When you get together what do you talk about?

Whenever I meet with my mentor, we simply start each meeting by catching up with each other and discussing our weeks with one another. We talk about how our families are doing during the quarantine, and we share short stories from our week. After catching up with each other, we get started with the mentorship. He usually just asks me what I want to practice, and we end up focusing on that. Whether that is reaching higher notes, developing better technique, or simply playing a bit of music, we simply discuss whatever topic I choose to develop.

5. What is going particularly well in your mentoring relationship right now?

One aspect of our relationship that I particularly value is how easy it is for us to talk casually to one another. When he isn’t teaching me, we usually tend to have a lot of simple small talk whether it’s about our families, or our experiences, or even just about music. I’ve come to really enjoy and appreciate the friendly atmosphere we have between each other where we are able to talk so easy about the most irrelevant topics whenever he isn’t teaching.

6. What are you learning about one another?

I’ve actually learnt quite a bit about him as we tend to have a lot of discussions together. We often talk about our families with one another as I have come to learn quite a bit about his family through our many discussions. He also personally knows my sister since he is her music teacher at her school. So in general, I’ve been able to get to know him at a very personal level.

 

Overall, I’ve been having a ton of fun with this project. Learning the trumpet has been such a new experience for me and now that I’m able to learn a few of the songs I’ve wanted to learn from the beginning, I’m really happy that I chose this for my In depth. But of course, this wouldn’t be same without Mr. Kwong who has been so kind, patient, and a good mentor to me and I really want to thank him for all of the time he spent mentoring me. So, a huge thanks to my mentor for being an amazing person. I know this isn’t quite over yet, but I feel the end slowly approaching, so it’s time to make the best of the remaining time I have left.

~ MJ

 

TALONS Digital Literacy #5

Graphic Arts Poster Series

Poster 1

Poster 2

Poster 3

Poster 4

Poster 5

Poster Series

Summary:

During my time in Graphic arts, we were assigned this project where we were asked to make a poster series for the evergreen art gallery. The poster series had to consist of five different posters that have a similar style to them. Each poster had to feature a piece of art from one of the artist and was stylized based on the featured art.

8. I challenge myself to increase my technological literacy by working with apps, software, or mediums that I have not used in the past

I have not used much photoshop at all until this class started, so using photoshop was still quite new to me when I did this project. So I challenged myself in the process of this assignment to use new tools and to explore more ways to feature this art.

14. I ethically use content that is not created by me by using Creative-Commons licensed audio, video, or images and by properly citing these resources within my work

When using the artist’s works of art, we needed to add a few pieces of text in order to give credit to the artists. We needed to add the artist’s name, the name of their art, as well a link to the evergreen website to ensure that we are giving credit and not claiming it as our own.

TALONS Digital Literacy #4

Parts of a Cell

The actual Powerpoint was deleted by the teacher, so I am unable to link that here.

Notes

Summary:

This project was a very unique because it was a huge project that the entire class worked together to make. Each person was assigned to research a specific part of the cell and presented their part to the class along with a powerpoint presentation. Each person was only allowed to use a maximum of 2 slides and one minutes for their presentation. In the end, we would have a very long presentation on all of the parts of the cell where everyone would take turns going up to the front of the class to present their assigned part of the cell.

2. I tailor my work to appeal to my intended audience, and use language and visual design elements appropriate for them

In order to make my presentation more engaging, I added a few jokes and pictures to make it more entertaining for my audience. However, I had to make sure that I didn’t put too many jokes since that may have made the entire presentation less educational. I also needed to change some of the wording from the sites I researched so that everyone would understand what I was saying without having to have prior knowledge on the topic. There was also one instance when a section that I took out ended up being put back into my presentation just before I went because one of the other presentations explained what a chloroplast was.

5. I enhance the impact of my research or presentation through creative use of technology

I took advantage of the animation feature in powerpoint to further enhance the presentation. I added a lot of movement to keep my audience engaged, and to make it seem like I put more effort into the project. For example, I animated a few oil containers to pack together into a box to show that leucoplasts store starch and oil in a cool and (hopefully) impressive way.

TALONS Digital Literacy #3

Midsummer Night’s Dream Character Analysis

Character Analysis Writing

Final Product

Summary:

For this project, we were put into groups and were asked to choose a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to analyze. My group members were Amin, David, and Mike as we chose to analyze Oberon, the king of fairies. So after reading through A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, we had to write about a few specific topics, these include: three traits that define Oberon, two wants and two fears that Oberon has, how the Oberon’s conflict(s) was resolved, and his connection to our thematic question, “What makes a good relationship?” After we each completed our assigned topics, we came together to create a poster that displayed all of our writing as well as a drawing of what we imagined Oberon would look like.

1. I use digital spaces to plan and execute collaborative projects with my peers

This project involved a lot of communication between our group members as we needed to assign tasks, edit each other’s work, and connect our writing in order for the final product to flow much better together. So we used programs like Google Docs to communicate and comment feedback on each other’s work to make sure our groups project was high quality.

3. I respond to the work or ideas of my peers in a way that is compassionate and productive

When editing each other’s work, I made sure that the comments and feedback that I gave my group members was constructive feedback that they were able to build on. For example, if a group member had trouble coming up with ideas or needed help refining more broad ideas, I always gave suggestions, but never forced any of my own ideas onto them. I didn’t want them to have to write about an idea/topic that they didn’t really know too much about or understand. I also did not insult, or reject anyone’s ideas, and instead chose to take each idea into consideration and discussed it with the group before rejecting the idea.

4. I constructively build upon or synthesize the ideas of my peers

Before we started to write, our group came together to collectively brainstorm for each person’s topic. For example, we had to come up with three traits that described Oberon the best and wrote about each trait. So, we all brainstormed as many character traits as we could. No one’s ideas were invalid or immediately rejecting. Instead, we built on, or refined everyone’s ideas. The idea of Oberon being a jealous character soon became the idea that Oberon was an emotionally driven character due to everyone building on, and refining that one idea.

7. I design my work with consideration given to aesthetics and design, such as consistent colour schemes, symmetry or organization of visual elements, and overall layout

When we put the poster together, I really took the aesthetics of the poster into consideration. First off, because the drawing of Oberon was something we couldn’t change easily, we decided to base the colour scheme of our entire poster on that image. So we ended up using blue for the background with a beige outline around the text, and a red title. We also wanted to make the poster symmetrical as possible considering that all the text had different lengths. Then before we glued anything, we made sure that we were happy with the overall layout of our poster by laying out all the pieces on the poster. Once we were sure about the layout, we then proceeded to glue down all of the cutouts.

TALONS Digital Literacy #2

ZIP

Inquiry Question Proposal

Research Notes for ZIP + Annotated Bibliography

Script for ZIP Video

Final Video

Summary:

Zip is a fast paced inquiry project that tests our research and time management skills. We start by creating an inquiry question that we can answer. We had the freedom to choose any project that we wanted, whether that be a skills like song writing, or a more research based question like a historical war. My inquiry question ended up being, “Why do odd spellings like ph and ey exist and is there any reason to keep these spellings in modern English?”  We were then given roughly two weeks to research and put together an artifact to represent our learning. There were no restrictions on how we showed our learning as long as the research was somehow implemented into the final artifact. For my artifact, I made a video of me answering my inquiry question and I tried my best to cram as much information into it as possible. We then presented our learning to our peers as we evaluated each other’s work.

6. I determine and use the most effective medium to present my work

After I had chosen my inquiry project, I had to choose how I wanted to present my work. But because my question was more research based, rather than skill based, there was no defined way to show my learning. So I brainstormed a few initial ideas, and came up with an essay, a powerpoint presentation, an infographic, a trifold, and lastly, a video. I immediately crossed out the essay and the trifold since they are both not very creative and are not the most enjoyable to make. I also assumed that my audience wouldn’t find it as interesting as a powerpoint presentation, or a video. Then later on during my research, I ended up eliminating the choice of an infographic mostly because I had a lot of information that I wanted to share and knew that I couldn’t fit all of that information on an infographic. Then finally, the choice came down to a powerpoint, or a video. I decided that I would only make a video if I had enough time to do so since making a video is very time consuming. In the end, I made a video since I had more time and wanted to show that I actually put a lot more effort into the video.

9. I critically assess research sources for Currency, Reliability, Authority, and Purpose

During the research phase of my project, I constantly had to check whether a source was actually credible. Some information on certain sources actually contradicted other sources, so I constantly had to fact check with other sources. If you take a look at my annotated bibliography , I have a few sites that I simply listed for the use of fact checking. For example, I often used wikipedia as a baseline to refer to. I would read the wikipedia article first and if a source contradicted what I had read on wikipedia, I would look for another source with similar to see which source was incorrect. I would also search up the writers of specific articles to see if they were actually credible people that I could take information from. An example of this being an article written by a person named Anatoly Liberman. Most of his article was actually quite bias against the topic and talked about ways the English language could approve, so I did a bit of background research on him to confirm that his claims and ideas would be credible. I turns out that he is indeed quite credible as an etymologist (Studies the history of language) from Oxford university as he has written many books and other articles talking about similar topics.

13. I attribute credit to ideas that are not my own by preparing a Bibliography/Works Cited and by using in-text citations

I am able to attribute credit to research and ideas that are not my own by creating an annotated bibliography/works cited.

TALONS Digital Literacy #1

Part Time Indian Presentation

Part Time Indian Script

Part Time Indian Power Point

Summary:

For this project, we were put into groups of 4 and each group was assigned a topic surrounding First Nations Peoples. Each group then did some research on the topic and were asked to create a powerpoint to present to the rest of the class. However, our presentations needed to be clear and concise as we were restricted by a time limit as well as a maximum amount of slides we were allowed to have. The group that I was assigned to consisted of me, Tyson, Colby, and Gyu min with topic of the Indian act. The topic was split into four sub-topics and we assigned one to each person. Tyson researched what the Indian act was, Colby had the topic of the impacts of it, Gyu min found and shared current events on the topic, while I looked into the future of the Indian act.

10. I identify and discuss bias in research resources 

For my sub-topic, the future of the Indian act, there were two main views on the situation, the government’s perspective, or the First Nations perspective. The government wants to get rid of the Indian act and make the First Nations Canadian citizens, while the First Nations want to keep the benefits of the Indian act while getting rid of the rest. In many of the sources that I researched, the author of each article chose to speak from only one of the perspectives. This made it so that each article was very biased against the other side. So I talked about this with one of my group members and we ended up having to present both stances during our presentation in order to seem more neutral than bias.

11. I go beyond google and use databases to find scholarly research sources

Before we started our research, Mr. Morris actually suggested that we use the Canada in Context database that is accessible through the Gleneagle library homepage. The database listed a ton of helpful sources that we ended up using for our research on the Indian act. I often used the date function to find newer articles on the Indian act in order to make sure that the information was not outdated. An example of an article I used on the database is this link that I used to do a little research on what the Indian act was before actually diving into my assigned sub-topic.

12. I look at controversial issues or topics from opposed perspectives to gain a more complete understanding. 

As mentioned before, when I was researching the future of the Indian act, I was forced to research both the government’s perspective, as well as the First Nations perspective due to the bias views that most of the articles had. I needed to relay my research without any bias for any side, so I needed to research both sides in order to gain a complete understanding to be able to take a more neutral stance on the matter. In fact, I ended up working together with a group member to put a “debate” into our presentation where we took opposite stances and argued for our side to show both stances in the situation.

 

In-Depth Blog Post #4

This is now my forth post, and I’ve got to say, I think I’ve improved a ton since the last blog post. I’ve managed to hit that octave note that I’ve been gunning for, and even played some more notes past that. Lately, I’ve been playing a few songs from a beginner’s trumpet book that my mentor lent me, and it has been going quite well. It took some practice to get used to changing notes quickly, but once I got the hang of it, it was only a matter of being able to play the notes. So my mentor actually suggested I find a few scores online to play so that we could start working on intonation and sound. I’ve also started recording myself playing the trumpet every Saturday to show as evidence of my work, and so that I can listen to my sound and tone better to help improve. A link to these recordings will be near the bottom.

What has been my most difficult mentoring challenge so far?  Why?

There are not many challenges that we are currently facing (apart from the fact that we cannot meet at the moment), but if I were to choose the most difficult challenge that I have had so far, it would be getting a consistent sound. Since I have just started getting used to the trumpet and all of its notes, producing a nice consistent sound is the next step. This means that I have to be able to play without having my notes “waver” or change in tone all too much while attempting to play with a good quality sound. But this has been proving quite challenging for two reasons. First off, I need to be able to play and recognize the good quality sound that the trumpet can produce. So far, my mentor has not focused too much on sound quality since being able to play the notes always comes first. Therefore, I don’t really know how to produce the sound that I am aiming for. Second, it’s hard to teach/show how to play a good sound. It doesn’t matter is I’ve perfectly memorized the good quality sound if I don’t know how to even get there. Luckily, my mentor is very good and thorough when he teaches, so I’m not too worried, but I will have to work quite hard in order to get there.

What is working well? Why?

My mentor is not really structuring our sessions and he is instead making my practices a lot more flexible. He doesn’t really give me assignments or sets goals for me and rather leaves most of it to me. He believes that allowing me to choose what I want to practice is better than him choosing what I should practice and I think that it is working very well. This is not to say that he doesn’t guide me in any way, or doesn’t do much, he simply gives me choices on what I feel like practicing at that moment. If I want to develop my range, he helps me grow my range. If I want to learn songs, he provides me with music to play and even plays along with me. I personally really like this approach as it helps me keep motivated in learning. Nothing feels forced on me and it even helps develop my own motivation to practice at home.

What could be working better?  How can you make sure this happens?

There is one aspect of my mentorship that I’ve constantly had a bit of trouble with, and that would be my own practices at home. It’s not that I don’t know what to do, or that I can’t do anything without my mentor, it’s just that I can’t practice for long periods of time without my lips getting tired. My mentor has specifically warned me that if I strain myself too much once my lips get tired, then I will end up developing bad playing habits. So I’ve had to keep my practices quite short everyday in order to avoid this. But the only way to develop my muscles is to simply practice often. Now that I have a lot of freetime, I have been practicing everyday to develop these muscles, and I will tell you that it is a lot of work. However, it’s a lot of fun to play familiar songs so I’ve been enjoying my practices rather than finding them as a chore to do everyday.

 

Recordings:

These recordings are actually louder than you would expect, so I suggest putting your volume down before starting the clips.

March 14

March 21

March 28

 

So far, this has been a ton of fun to do and may even be my favourite project ever. I’ve also got something to do to pass the time so that’s a bonus I never asked for! I’m going to thank my Mr. Kwong once again for being such a wonderful mentor and for helping me get to this point. I now need to find some new music to learn, so I will go do that. In the meantime, stay safe, wash your hands, and I will see you in the next video post!