Progress Update:

For the past couple of weeks, my mentor and I have been focused on perfecting technique. I’ve been concentrating on playing around five basic songs and getting really good at them. The songs that I’ve been playing are still quite easy and mainly focus on the basic notes and keys that are used in most songs. So far, I’ve been able to play about four songs from start to finish with practically no errors or hesitation. Once I feel confident in my abilities with the foundation of learning to play the accordion I’ll hopefully be able to learn new skills faster and with more ease.

Between now and the next post I want to start to introduce some new songs that have more notes or are played faster. When doing this I have to make sure that I don’t end up moving on too quickly and instead focus on getting good at a certain skill before moving on to learning the next one. My goal is to learn at least three new songs between now and the next post.

How to Have a Beautiful Mind:

 “How to be interesting” and “How to respond”

In “How to Have a Beautiful Mind,” De Bono suggests talking about what you are passionate about, asking thought-provoking questions, asking for clarification, and building onto conversations. All of these ideas and strategies help form bonds with others (especially mentors) and allow for a deeper understanding while learning.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve mainly been working on building a strong foundation over the past few weeks. This means that I’ve been playing a few different basic songs and learning all the notes for them. I’ve noticed that most of the songs share the same notes and are played at the same speed/tempo. My mentor and I have been using this knowledge to find some songs that are similar and learning them to perfect the basics, and then eventually we can work on finding songs that are different to expand my skill set.

I have also been trying to ask my mentor “what if questions.” For example, about a week ago, I was practicing playing one of the songs I was working on and I was curious about the speed it was played at, so I asked “what if the song was played at a faster speed similar to a few other songs.” After asking this my mentor showed me how to switch between keys faster and I was able to play the song all the way through. After playing it, I realized that when it was sped up it sounded almost identical to another song that I had played earlier, which was a cool connection to make.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve mainly been focusing on asking for clarification whenever I’m confused about something. In the past, I’ve found that I like to try and figure things out on my own rather than seek help, but this project has forced me to change that. Now whenever I’m confused about how a certain note is played, or when the bellows should be pushed rather than pulled, I make sure to ask for clarification from my mentor.