In-Depth – Blog Post #2

Hello! Welcome to my Second Blog Post for My 2021 In-Depth Project!

Progress Report

Since my last blog post, I’ve had much progress on my In-Depth Project. The weekend after my first update, I got a bass guitar and an amp. I learned how to adjust the amp and the bass, volume wise. I had some trouble at first as there were so many dials on the amp as well as some on the bass itself. But after my mentor told me what the dials on the bass meant, it began to make more sense. Oh! I also had my first meeting with my mentor! A week after my first blog post, I set up a meeting with my mentor, Tito Paul. As it was my first year doing anything similar to this project, I was adequately nervous for the meeting, even if I knew him beforehand. I hadn’t known what to prepare so I had a notebook to take notes, but that was about it. During the meeting I asked some of the questions that I wrote in my learning contract and attempted small talk. Key word attempted. But near the end of the meeting, I panicked and my mind blanked while looking for another question to ask. So, I ended up ending the meeting earlier than I had originally planned. (Later to make up for the meeting, I asked if mentor was available the next week for a meeting) However, despite the short meeting I as able to learn a lot. Because I had a few questions prepared on the learning contract, in the beginning I ended up learning a lot about the bass guitar itself rather then playing it. I learned how the bass guitar differed from the piano and how it was similar. I also learned how notes progressed on the fretboard, which I thought was really mind-blowing as I had never known what notes on a fretboard moved up by semitones (half steps). I also found it interesting when Tito Paul told me about the ‘role’ of a bass in a song. He told me that in a song, the bass plays a melody that is usually repeats and is constant. He compared it to keeping beat, like how a drum does. Near the end, I asked him if there was anything that he thought would be easy to learn or practice for the next week(s). He taught me an ‘exercise’ that I could do with the different styles of plucking the strings to get fast at moving between strings.

 

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 one to three.

 

Chapter One

Chapter One was all about how to agree with someone. One of the points that de Bono mentions in this chapter is to try and put effort into finding bits of what the other person is saying that you agree with. When I read this part, I thought that it was a pretty smart thing to think about. It causes you to really listen to what they’re saying and try to look for positives. I tried this when I was with Tito Paul when he was trying to explain how a bass works in a musical piece. I wanted to genuinely agree with what he was saying, but I didn’t understand where he was coming from. So I tried to look for points where he and I could both relate, him being self-taught and me being classically trained (both equally great ways to learn an instrument by the way). Eventually we got to a point where I could understand what he was trying to imply and therefore was able to agree with it. This happened multiple times during the meeting such as when he was trying to explain how the notes progressed. I was able to relate it to a keyboard moving up by semitones (half steps).

De Bono also mentioned in the chapter to not agree all the time with what the other is saying. He talked about how that doesn’t make the conversation interesting. While I agreed completely with what he was saying, I realized that that’s what I’ve always been doing for a large portion of my life. I was always too scared to disagree as to avoid conflict. Realizing this I decided that I would try to step out of the box I’ve pushed myself into. During the meeting, I didn’t just always nod along to everything he said. I tried to ask questions and ask why he thought one way was better or one exercise would help etc.

 

Chapter Two

In Chapter Two, de Bono talks about how to disagree with someone. I found this chapter to be really interesting as I think learning how to disagree with someone is something I ought to learn. I found this topic much harder to use when with my mentor. My mentor was so nice it was difficult to disagree with him! However, though there was nothing said that concerned my ‘truth’, I was able to recognize some of the points de Bono talks about concerning disagreeing during our conversation. One that I noticed was the point he made about different experiences. I mentioned before that I was classically trained in piano and Tito Paul was self-taught bass guitar. Because of this, we had different views and knowledge based on our backgrounds and experiences. However, despite this, we made an effort to understand where the other was coming from. We also tried to make an effort to learn what the other was talking about. For example, I was talking about scales because that’s part of how I learned piano, and Tito Paul didn’t really know much about scales. But he made the effort to look it up so that we could talk about something that we’d both understand (which was very kind of him).

 

Chapter Three

In the book How to Have a Beautiful Mind, de Bono dedicates a chapter to learning how to differ. This chapter was really interesting because I didn’t know ‘differing’ was any different to disagreeing. He mentions preference in this chapter, which I thought was pretty cool. I will often think about how preference would influence your Big Truths and how you view the world. So, seeing it put into words was very informative and taught me a lot about how preference can cause you to differ. I noticed this when Tito Paul and I were talking about how to pluck a bass guitar string. There were four different ways. Slapping the string, Plucking the string (with thumb and pointer finger), strumming the string (with your thumb), and using a pick. Tito Paul told me that he preferred the pick because that’s how he learned it and he felt more comfortable with it. Me on the other hand preferred using my thumb to strum or thumb and pointer finger to pluck. Maybe this had to do with me playing a little bit of acoustic guitar before or using my hands when playing piano? But in the end, Tito Paul said whatever works best for you is the one you should stick with (unless you’re learning how to slap the bass as a style of playing). That was what part of the exercise he gave me earlier was for. I was to try out the different style playing to see what worked the best for me.