Musical Aspirations

In 2017 I picked up violin again, after a 15 year hiatus. I’d played throughout fourth grade, but then put the instrument down to focus on my studies.¹

I’m now plodding away at learning guitar and violin, and playing bits on the keyboard. It would be good to have some goals so I can direct my studies. One candidate goal based on my recent playing would be to produce You’ve Got a Friend in Me on all of these instruments: piano, violin, guitar, and I could even do vocals. I could record each of these separately and put them together in Ableton.

Playing this on piano and violin seems well within reach. However, the number of new chords and speed of switching required to play it on guitar (at least from the arrangement I’ve seen so far) doesn’t feel super within reach right now. And as for the vocals… well, I can at least get the words out, even if not the notes.

Returning to the last time I thought about musical goals, I had some smaller ambitions:

• On piano, I wanted to be able to play all the scales
• On violin, You’ve Got a Friend in Me
• And I hadn’t even started guitar yet..

Ah, I’ve just checked and I’d misremembered:

• My violin goal from Dec 3 2022 was to play scales in every key.
• My piano goal was also to play scales in every key.
• And my guitar goal was to play the chords in House of the Rising Sun.

I think these goals still seem like proper first goals. So, by putting them in a snippet, perhaps I will encourage myself to pursue them more quickly. Then I can get to my You’ve Got a Friend In Me goals sooner.