Plans, Plans, and More Plans [Week 0]

I was never good at making decisions.  Whether it be who to partner up with or what to eat for dinner, a solid decision almost never comes out of my mouth.  Now, when given a project where I get to decide what to learn, the amount I struggled coming up with a topic was not surprising.  

However, in the end, I somehow came up with two ideas that I thought would make a good presentation: making a new language and learning Francis Bacon's binary code.  Did I have an interest in either?  Not at all. I came up with these ideas because I had difficulty figuring out what I was interested in.

Until it hit me.  Maybe not right in the face, but somewhere along the cheek area, I was slapped and startled awake by the topic of music. I came to realize how much I listened to music on a daily basis, the different instruments I played, and more instruments that I desired to learn. The possible instruments I wanted to play are listed below:

1. Guitar
2. Flute
3. Saxophone
4. Violin
5. Cello

Immediately, cello, saxophone and flute were bumped off the list.  Why, might you ask?  Due to their accessibility.  I do not own any of those three instruments, so it would be difficult to practice when the only accessible instruments are at school.  Guitar was also taken off because I knew a decent amount of chords already, and I wanted to challenge myself to play an instrument I have not really experienced playing that much before.  

Well, this pretty much narrowed my topics down to the violin.  So the violin it was. It was not only the process of elimination that caused me to choose the violin as my topic.  There were reasons why I wanted to learn it as well:

1. I enjoyed listening to my father play it when I was younger
2. I have a passion and a love for classical music
3. I wanted to play the violin since I was young

Now that the general idea has been decided, a plan must be created.  Time management is a key ingredient to a successful product, am I right?

I divided my time into approximately five weeks, each week completing a different task each day in helping myself to learn the violin.  Since visuals are almost always more appealing than words, why not present the details in a timeline?

For week 1, I will be focusing on the fundamentals of the violin before actually playing. This will be done by looking into videos on youtube of basics such as what kinds of fingerings to use on certain strings and imitating those videos with a violin. Weeks two and three will be using beginner violin books to work on my playing technique.  These violin books are called Suzuki.  These books were put together by Shinichi Suzuki with the purpose in grasping proper technique for beginner violin players. The final two weeks will be practicing an intermediate level piece in order to focus on the dynamics, emotions, and flow of a song when played by the violin.

So, in the end, what are my goals for this project?  Reaching that intermediate level of violin playing would be my largest goal.  How to measure that I reached that goal? I will record a small video or recording of my playing every week and upload them each time a new blog post is posted. As time passes, hopefully the fluid, emotional, clear-sounding, intermediate level violin playing will be shown.

For the time being, nothing that I have discovered created a way to set me away from accomplishing this goal.  Unless, of course, procrastination decides to take over.