In the first half of my musical growth learning I focused on mastering the basics of music, with a strong focus on music literacy, learning the fundamentals of notes, scales, intervals, and chords. For the second half I decided to learn a more complex song and focus on applying my learnings from the first half. The song I chose (Valerie by Amy Winehouse) was quite challenging and so I decided that focusing on mastering only a portion of it would be more feasible for me. I used a resource called HDPiano to learn the song which took me through learning the song and broke it down into its components. Valerie is in the key of Eb Major, it is quite simple harmonically (there aren’t many chords) however that challenge came in the complex rhythm. It required me to really work on my fingering and one of the biggest learning curves was training myself to play a different rhythm pattern on my right hand while maintaining a separate rhythm on my left. I had to spend a lot of time engraining the rhythm into my head and developing a strong muscle memory in my hands. The intro and the verse were probably the easiest parts of the song to get comfortable with but the prechorus and the chorus were extremely difficult and even in my final video I am still struggling with those parts.
