Intro – What is In-Depth?

In-Depth is a big part of the TALONS curriculum. The project is done annually and takes place over the course of five months. The project requires the students to pick a skill or topic that they want to develop over the time given. (ex. ASL, computer programming, rollerblading etc.) It’s also good to mention that when choosing your skill, it’s important that you choose a topic that you’re passionate about. As no one wants to spend 5 months over a skill they find boring! Before starting the project, they also must choose a mentor. Their mentor is an expert in the skill chosen and will help the student if they have any questions or if they need help.  Students then learn as much as they can about their skill in the best way they can. Throughout the five months, they document their progress with blog posts and at the end they’ll have a final product prepared to show their learning.

 

What is My Skill and What Will I Learn?

For my In-Depth skill I chose to learn the bass guitar! To start, some of the basic information that I want to learn will be the parts and string names of the bass guitar. This will provide me with a foundation to learning how to play the instrument. After that I will be able to learn how to hold the guitar and play the strings. Later, building off of that, I can learn how to play along to songs and play scales. (such as the blues scale, dorian scale etc.) Some extra information that I thought would be interesting to learn about would be how bass guitar contributes to a song and how a bass line is decided or made.

 

Why Did I Choose My Skill?

I haven’t always liked music. But when I really started to get into it, I REALLY tried my best to know as much about it as I could.  Part of that was me wanting to learn about and how to play as many different instruments as I could. The steadiness and rich sound is what drew me the most towards the bass. I’ve always wanted to try learning how to play but I always put it off, so now I have an excuse to learn!

 

Who’s My Mentor?

My mentor for my project is tito Paul. He plays the bass guitar as one of his hobbies as well as a band that my dad is also in. He’s passionate about playing the bass guitar and I think that’s really important when playing an instrument.

 

What Can Others Do to Help?

The people around me most when I’ll be practicing will probably be my family. So hopefully my family can help remind me to practice when I forget or be my mock audience when I need to perform in front of someone. I’m also working with my mentor, tito Paul, so I can ask him questions that he can hopefully answer (thanks tito Paul!) Luckily, I’ll also be around my other classmates who are also doing the same project. Albeit not the same skill, we can still remind each other about practicing or getting a blog post done.

 

Resources

When you’re learning to play an instrument, it’s probably a good idea to have a variety of resources in case you don’t understand a concept explained one way. Some of my resources are going to be books I can borrow from the library or buy somewhere. I’m also going to use a variety of online resources such as websites, blogs and YouTube videos as they’re easy to access and if I need a visual I can use YouTube to watch someone. To get a better idea of how pro bass guitarists play, I was thinking of looking for videos of some famous/professional bass guitarists. For example, these videos of George porter playing bass (which I thought sounded very funky and very cool) and Thundercat who’s bass guitar style I found really interesting. I could also listen to some songs that demonstrate bass guitar in a great way. Of course, I also have tito Paul who I can hopefully ask questions if I have any.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIkrdg18Ngc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8FBaYlOkEA

 

My Timeline

I made a timeline for my In-Depth which I can hopefully stick to. I left lots of room near the end for more practice or in case I need extra time to learn something.

Find a mentor, tell them the details of the project and get the forms done	Before January 10th
Rent/borrow/purchase a bass guitar as well as find possible resources such as books or videos	Before winter break ends (or even a few days [3-4] days after)
Learn the parts of the bass guitar	During first week of learning
Learn how to care for it (storage, how to plug it in, when to change certain parts)	During first week of learning
How to pluck the strings and how to hold my hands on the fret board	Second week of learning
Learn how to play notes and how the notes progress along the fretboard	Third week of learning
Have the first meeting with mentor	Second week of learning
Learn scales (10)	fifth week of learning
Learn arpeggios	ninth week of learning
Learn the different styles of playing the bass (can relate it to musical theory or piano)	thirteenth week of learning
Try playing along to songs (look up the notes online for the song)	fifteenth week of learning
Practice practice practice	All 5 months!
How to tune a bass guitar	First week of learning
How to read sheet music for bass guitar	Fourth week of learning
Have second meeting with mentor	Fourth week of learning
Have third meeting with mentor	Sixth week of learning
Have fourth meeting with mentor		eighth week of learning
Have sixth meeting with mentor		Twelfth week of learning
Have seventh meeting with mentor		Fourteenth week of learning
Have eighth meeting with mentor		Sixteenth week of learning
Have ninth meeting with mentor		Eighteenth week of learning
Have tenth meeting with mentor		Twentieth week of learning

 

What I’ve Accomplished So Far

So far I’ve done some research on the parts of the guitar and saw some videos of people playing the bass guitar to get used to how they hold or play it. I’ve focused my time on getting a mentor (which I did yay!) So now I’m just waiting for the paperwork before I can start planning the meetings with him. This week or next I want to get the bass guitar and amp from Long and McQuade. Over the winter break we looked at renting them and I did some research on what guitar would be best. So hopefully I can look and maybe rent one this week!