Once I started guitar 12, I already had 13 years of experience, felt professional in older, jazz, and classical melodies under roughly 140 bpm (beats per minute), at a sub-satisfactory amount of being able to predict what notes come next in a song based off of melodic/harmonic progression, and having what felt like an extending level of comprehension and knowledge on musical theory. Once the course started picking up, most of what we went over were chords with consistent opportunities to play bar-chords, while playing extremely easy melodies almost all in tab (tablature) over treble-clef. However, as a proactive reaction to the simple melodies, I decided to play it one octave on the strings up, which made it surprisingly easier to go between notes and now I think I have gotten used to playing simple melodies that way. I am happy to know that I have improved in terms of chords, as I am able to produce clearer sound from my bar-chords, I am able to change chords faster (enough to the point I can play all the songs we have had to play as a class).

Along with the chords, I have also received the opportunity to play a song of my choice several times. That if which I have so far chosen the FNAF 1 song (which plays at 180 bpm), Wet Hands (which even though seems slow when playing it, it is quite difficult to keep the same pace at the piano version, and to have the notes and loud or silenced as they should be), and for my third song I chose Ruins (a background original soundtrack from the game Undertale, but a much lower note version of it. The notes that my teacher helped me find was the perfect sound, just way too high on the fretboard, so after printing those pages for me, I chose to rewrite all of it by hand to simpler but the exact same notes). I spent time from guitar in grade 9 to learn how to listen to and identify notes, and I am happy that skill has been paying off as I write and listen to the music instead of constantly needing to go back to the printed version then flip back to the page I was writing on. Those three are evidence enough that I can master guitar skills possibly to a somewhat “complex” level.

I used to think fast paced or songs with many chords were challenging, but now I know that there are more difficult skills, and the things that I found challenging before the start of the course are much easier than I thought as long as I put in more practice then I normally would, which makes sense seen as how just playing guitar is not just about muscle memory, music comprehension, and sight reading, but also muscle strength to persevere through the songs. Before the start of the course, one of the things that I believed was easy with just a little bit of practice (as long as all parties knew what they were doing) was songs that required multiple guitars (specifically trios), this was proved wrong when forming class groups to decide on a song to play in-front of the rest of the class, and after two weeks of practicing our song (Viva La Vida), it was still troubling to keep in sync and not lose where we are. After that experience, I am now more clear on the difference between playing individually verses collaborating musically.