It is now the eve before I have to hand in my final musical growth video for music and I am not going to lie I am nervous. It took me over 2 weeks to memorize how to play the beginning picking of Fast Car and I am still not happy with my pace or with my transitions from chord to chord. I realized that I took far too much time and effort working on the beginning intro part of the song and now my usual easy strumming abilities are being compromised throughout the rest of the song. The resources that are assisting me throughout this process have been “play with me” youtube tutorials and writing down cheat notes for strumming patterns and for my picking patters. As noted in my last blogs I wanted to attempt to understand how the picking pattern diagrams work, however, after many attempts of googling and referring back and forth from my ukulele to the online pattern diagrams, I realized that is for my best interest that I should just memorize how the YouTuber plays and then just forget about learning to read these diagrams for the time being. It is not all bad news though, although my picking and my strumming are not to my expectations my singing hasn’t failed me. Fast Car is my all-time favorite song and it is my goal to be dancing my first dance at my wedding to this very song (preferably with Tracy Champman live singing) so the lyrics come easy to me and I find myself naturally singing alone to my playing. Because Fast Car is one of my most favorite songs I think that this is part of the reason why I am feeling so discouraged about my process of learning to play this song. I wish to play this song to the best of my abilities and do give this song the justice it deserves.

Even though this is my final blog required for EDCI 306 this does not mean that I am stopping my ukulele playing or giving up on Fast Car. It is important to me that I can bring music into my future classroom as a teacher and I can just imagine how cute it would be learning new songs for my students every week as we sit for carpet time. We will see how tomorrow goes for filming and hopefully I will feel more confident by the time of my last practice session tonight.