This week, I spent many hours and expended a significant amount of energy on my Free Inquiry project. Unfortunately, only twenty minutes of that was actually spent playing music – ostensibly the topic of my inquiry.

What the bulk of my time actually went towards was everything to do with creating videos to document my progress. From my brief experience using the Windows video editor during our Screencasting class session, I decided that I needed to get a better editing tool. This was much more arduous than I anticipated. After researching various options, I downloaded some that ended up not working on my computer, but eventually was able to install DaVinci Resolve 17. Before recording videos of myself with my instruments, I decided I should devote some time to following a tutorial and editing a practice video to familiarize myself with the program. After I finally recorded myself playing, it took me a few hours to edit the limited footage I had, despite the frankly limited effort I put into making the videos look good (partly because the video quality was poor anyway, and partly because I had already spent too much time on it).

Although I spent much more time on the technical side of this project, and subsequently much less on my music than I had hoped, I am still glad that I did take the time to figure this out. While the process of downloading and beginning to learn DaVinci Resolve 17 was long and frustrating, I do believe that investing that time upfront will ultimately make documenting my progress easier down the road. Also, while video is not the focus of my inquiry, I am glad to be able to use this as an opportunity to also learn some (very) basic video editing skills. However, I will try to record future videos in ways that do not take up so much time to edit.

Which is the transition to my main purpose here, my music…

For this post, I decided to record my very first ten-minute practice sessions each for piano and for flute. My goal was to show the baseline that I am starting from in order to get a more accurate picture of my progress over time. I filmed all ten minutes of each practice session, then edited the videos down to only show a few clips. In the future, however, I think I will only film predetermined segments to reduce editing time.

All things considered, my first session on piano went better than I had expected. I found that I did retain a bit of automaticity for some scales and things that I wanted to play, but that other keys were less familiar. Last year I became somewhat obsessed with sea shanties, so I had decided that I wanted to learn Paul Hankinson’s arrangement of The Wellerman. I purchased the sheet music and did make some progress, but I never learned it all and I let it sit dormant for half a year. In my video below, I show my attempt at playing the first page, which was a very humbling experience. The portion I filmed is one that I actually used to play somewhat comfortably, but that is clearly no longer the case. Therefore, my next steps will involve refamiliarizing myself with the parts of the song I used to know. I will also need to practice the scales and other technique elements for the key this part of the song is written in, as well as get myself comfortable reading music in the base clef again (it seems that I remember the treble clef reasonably well).

Flute, however, was a different story. I was honestly a bit embarrassed by my incompetence at something I used to be able to do fairly well. I found that I have mostly forgotten the fingerings for each note, so much of the footage from what I had filmed was just me silently trying to figure them out. Also, I had a harder time keeping good tone and pitch than I had expected, so much of the sound I produced was quite grating on the ears. Interestingly, I found the waveforms in the audio while I was editing the video to be useful feedback for this (in addition to listening to it again), which I may find useful in assessing my progress throughout this project. All that I included in the video was my first few notes as I was getting familiar again with the breath and positioning, and my best attempts at a scale at the very end of the ten minutes – which still leaves much to be desired. My next steps are to re-learn the fingerings, which I will do by trying to get myself comfortable playing various scales (I only attempted F major here). As I do this, I will also work to improve my breath control.

Even though most of my time was not spent directly on my piano or flute, I do feel accomplished from what I have done so far, and I am looking forward to continuing this project. I already described some of the specific elements I intend to work on for each instrument, but I also plan on create something to document the time I spend practicing and what I work on each session (probably a table on Google Sheets).  Hopefully I will be able to see my progress correlate with time spent practicing.