My name is Stephen and I am currently serving in the U.S. Army. I have been in for 15 years and along the way, I've been in many bands. I mostly stuck to singing, as I hadn't taught myself or been taught to play any instruments. I mostly sing Rock and Country, now, but I actually started out singing Hair Metal (IE. Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, etc). Having to move to a new duty station, every three years, is very tough on a music career thats depending upon a band sticking together. Therefore, I am finally deciding to go my own way and hopefully start up my own solo act and decided I'd start with the piano (yes, I do own an acoustic and electric guitar as well). I am currently stationed in Arizona, as a recruiter, but my time in the Army may be coming to an end, soon, so I'm ready to get this show going.
If anyone has any pointers, I'm all ears!!
Also, I tried to go request a song, but it won't allow me to do that and says it's locked. There is one artist that I am very much inspired by, who doesn't have any songs on the app, to learn, so please let me know how to request a song so that I can buy it as soon as possible. Thank you and hope you are all having a great night. Stay safe and keep rockin!
Glad to meet ya'll
-
andrewwegierski
- Posts: 783
- Joined: Fri Apr 06, 2018 4:37 pm
Re: Glad to meet ya'll
Hey Stephen,
Welcome! I'm really excited for you to begin your journey with some new instruments. That's really cool. As a professional musician myself, I guess my main pointer(s) would be a couple things:
-Practice often, but not for long blocks of time. Practicing every day for only 30 minutes is better than once a week for 4 hours.
-Divide your practice between required things, and things you are passionate about. For example, split up your time between fundamentals / scales / technique and songs you like. If all you do is technique, it might feel like work. If all you do is songs, you're going to have a lot of fun, but you might not develop necessary technical skills. I think a lot of people especially in music school fall into the former category, and they become technique robots, and it's easy to forget why you even wanted to play an instrument in the first place.
-Achieve a conscious balance between "just playing" and "grinding out one small section." This is really hard and something I've struggled with. With Playground Sessions, you've got so much material to play through. So if you spend a lot of time on small chunks of music, it might feel too much like work. Try to just play more content. However, if you're breezing through all the content quickly, then it's easy to feel like you're not really making much progress. In my experience, just thinking about this polarity between the two approaches helps me.
As for the songs, follow this link to request one: https://playgroundsessions.uservoice.co ... g-requests
Best,
Andy
Welcome! I'm really excited for you to begin your journey with some new instruments. That's really cool. As a professional musician myself, I guess my main pointer(s) would be a couple things:
-Practice often, but not for long blocks of time. Practicing every day for only 30 minutes is better than once a week for 4 hours.
-Divide your practice between required things, and things you are passionate about. For example, split up your time between fundamentals / scales / technique and songs you like. If all you do is technique, it might feel like work. If all you do is songs, you're going to have a lot of fun, but you might not develop necessary technical skills. I think a lot of people especially in music school fall into the former category, and they become technique robots, and it's easy to forget why you even wanted to play an instrument in the first place.
-Achieve a conscious balance between "just playing" and "grinding out one small section." This is really hard and something I've struggled with. With Playground Sessions, you've got so much material to play through. So if you spend a lot of time on small chunks of music, it might feel too much like work. Try to just play more content. However, if you're breezing through all the content quickly, then it's easy to feel like you're not really making much progress. In my experience, just thinking about this polarity between the two approaches helps me.
As for the songs, follow this link to request one: https://playgroundsessions.uservoice.co ... g-requests
Best,
Andy