James Haye's Second Entry

Hello, it’s James Haye again, and in this blog entry I will be talking about what I did in terms of Music work this week. On the 5ht of December I practiced and played a song by Bruno mars, featuring Travie Mccoy. I managed to retrieve the chords from s website called ultimate guitar. There were many versions at first will different chords, but eventually I found one that just had simple mayor chords. I need to find one like that because I am not that advanced in the guitar playing ability. The information on the page just had the lyrics, the chords and if you needed a capo. A capo is a steel clip with a rubber face that raps round your guitar and takes it one note higher, required that you have standard tuning. But this version of the song didn’t need one. However the enclosed information did not have the strumming patterns in. So I had to work that bit out myself. After playing a few times I got the hang of the chords the lyrics and the strumming pattern. Overall I think I leant and memorised that song, and that may not be a big achievement but an achievement never the less. 

I made a few changes to my Professional Development Plan this week. I create a time table of thing to do, at what time and on what day. I haven’t missed one day so far. Include in my time table I added a significant amount of time for me to practise. I played the song by Bruno Mars and also I practised in total this week on the 3^rd and the 7^th of December for, 1hour and 15minutes. I may not seem a lot but if I do a little bit more each week, then in the long term it will defiantly improve my overall skills. I haven’t found any falls in my timetable so far, as a result of that, I think I will continue with my plan and try my best to accomplish the task I have set for myself.

On the 4^th of December I read a book called The AB Guide to Music Theory. I read chapter 1 called The Basics of Rhythm and Tempo. The first part of the chapter was about Time Values. There are different Notes for different symbols, I couldn’t find all of the symbols on my Microsoft Word computer, although if you copy and paste the words into Google images, I’m sure it will show you a picture. Therefore I am just going to right all my notes and words down that I took at the time to summarise the Chapter. Big drum, Footsteps: - left, right, left, right, small drum. One semibreve = whole note, Two minims = half notes, Four crotchets = quarter notes, Eight quavers = eighth notes, Sixteen semiquavers = sixteenth notes. Symbols can be drawn as different symbols but they still mean the same thing. The second part is information about Time Signatures; the third part is information about Tempo and the forth part is information on Rhythm. Then after that it moves onto chapter two. I strongly advise you go out for yourself and buy The AB Guide to Music Theory. It is a great reading book and it provides lots of useful information about the life of Music. See you in my Third Blog Entry.