Spring Project – Introduction

I have spent nearly six years practicing the guitar. To start, I mostly focused my attention on genres of music such as classic rock, learning songs by artists like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and more. Over the years my taste in music has changed drastically, and with it, the music I learned to play on the guitar. More recently, although I don’t listen to it frequently, I have become fascinated with classical music. Classical music has never interested me in the past, as I fell into the nearly universal opinion that it is “boring”. However, while studying one night, I decided to give it a try and I was blown away. As I listened to the older classical works such as Bach and Mozart, I discovered a whole world of new music I have never heard before. Not surprisingly, this string of classical listening led me to my next obsession – the piano. Specifically, I started listening to artists like Korean pianist Yiruma and Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi. Here is a song I really enjoyed by Einaudi:

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a piano to learn these songs so I had to improvise. Turns out, guitarists everywhere have adapted songs like these into guitar tablature. This is when I ran into another problem. These songs are not easy to learn to play. The note structure in songs like these is very complex, leaving the songs only to be learned by guitar experts. I was extremely discouraged. Luckily, I see this 10-hour project as a great opportunity to take up this challenge again. My goal is to learn one of my favorite songs of all time on guitar – River Flows in You by Yiruma. I think that this goal is achievable because I have tried to learn this song in the past, giving me an edge on this challenge. I think that I will find that I will struggle most with the fingerstyle techniques that this song utilizes. Like many songs like it, River Flows in You follows a unique time signature along with inconsistent note patterns. This means that I will certainly have to buckle down and focus on the immense task at hand. I will use written tablature along with various YouTube tutorials to help me achieve this goal. The final product should look something like the video below. This rendition was done by an amazing guitarist on YouTube named James Bartholomew.

Wish me luck!

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