So... How long do I have to be a beginner for?

Okay so I'm now at two songs that I can play at full speed - sometimes.  You know, if the stars align and the moon's in Jupiter, and I'm home alone, and Sasha's not trying to get my attention, and, and, and...  lol. Except the list of songs I want to learn is piling up MUCH faster than my ability to learn them.  Let me tell you, it's a PAINFUL process.  Once I get to 50% speed, pretty much the next day is 75% and the following 100% -- but getting to that 50...  Ouch.

But anyways - I'm enjoying myself and prouder than I should be of my sincerely pathetic playing when, for some reason, I went into the app on my computer (aka web based) instead of on my iPad - which I play from.   Well this is all good, except of course none of my filters were set.  What filters? you may ask...  Well, the most important one is "BEGINNER" lol.   OMG.  My little two songs that I was oh so proud of....  Yeah, they also have intermediate, advanced, and PRO, versions.   And the pro versions sound AMAZING.  So much more texture and depth to them.  *sigh*.   Also, they're longer.  Lol I guess they realize beginners are going to be glad to get through anything -- they're not wrong ;-P.   Like kids don't start out reading War and Peace (I hope!).   

It turns out not all songs have all the levels - in fact most don't - but it seems that both my first two have all four.  SO, I've decided that in order to not be totally demoralised by this, I'm going to use it to track my progress.   At some point around the 30 day mark I will record the beginner version of each...   Then go away and learn a bunch of other things and some day when I'm ready for the intermediate version, I'll have a comparison...  Rinse and repeat ;). This is my new plan.

Oh WOW.  😂 so I went back and looked at the vids I took the day I found a plan to learn from and "officially" started (just checked - date stamped Nov 11) - I wanted to see if I had either of the songs (spoiler alert - I have 30 seconds of both) - suddenly I feel WAY better about where I've gotten to.  Which means if I ever get to the advanced level, these are going to be golden.  Right now they're just horrifying, but it already made me laugh, so that's a win. 

Also, I had a random classical song in my head that I had no idea what it was but decided I wanted to learn it.  lol well just clicking through the classics, I found it (for the curious - turned out to be Für Elise).  Alas, it does not have a beginner version.  Intermediate here I come ;).  Fortunately the other classic that I love (Cannon in D) IS available in beginner.  And every other level ;)  So there's that.   Alas, the only Christmas song I have any interest in playing is also a minimum of intermediate so you know - I'm sure that's reasonable between now and Christmas ;-P.  Brute force and stubbornness for the win?   We'll see.  

I do have hopes that eventually as I get better the learning curve for each song will be slightly less.  It'll also help if/when I get better at reading bass cleft.  Argh.  Still gets me every time.

In other news, I'm on day 14 of my 20 day course -- today was the first one I found really challenging.  I definitely took more than one try to get through parts of it and will likely have to repeat.   I'm actually pleased I made it this far without getting stuck.  While it's certainly not going to have me playing hundreds of pop songs, it DID make a lot of things click and make sense, so my "Super Easy Hit Songs" book that I purchased I actually CAN play a number of them.  Albeit slowly and painfully.  But it's fully credit to my 20 days of YouTube that I can even do that.  

Also - you read that right - I purchased sheet music?!?!  😂 that might be a first since I'm quite certain my parents and/or high school financed all of my flute music way back when.  I also purchased some online which is great cause in that app it'll play it for you so you can hear how it should sound and play along at different speeds.   The only down side is flipping pages.  Wtf?  How is this still a problem.   I mean it's getting there.  In that the app is still set up like pages of music, which it flips when you get to the appropriate note automatically, but you still have that gap where you can't be reading ahead to the next note.   I mean serious first world problems here ;-P. The learning app the music just scrolls constantly so you can always see what's next.   I feel like all the apps should do that.   As to the actual book with physical pages - it's beginner level and as aforementioned, beginner songs are shorter.  In this case - they all fit on two pages, so no flipping required.  Also it's so beginner level the chords are just printed on top and the treble notes even have the letters in each note 😂.  Does solve my inability to read music issue though.  There is clearly a market for beginner adults out there.    All kinds of opportunity for short term success.

Anyways - I think that's enough for tonight ;).  Thanks for joining me on the adventure!

My music room AND my reading room happen to also be Tucker's sleeping room.  
And he would really prefer it if I'd please turn the lights out now.