I am very passionate about listening to and playing music, especially the keyboard. I have a keen interest in music as it is a very good way to relieve stress and tension as well as spend time away from a screen. This program has helped me enhance my skills and has made me explore more genres and types of music. I have heard and tried to play a lot of songs during this period and have improved a lot as an artist.In this particular activity, I used to play for 45-60 minutes a day for a couple of weeks. I used to play keyboard in school, but to improve my timing during chord shifts and solos, I used to independently practice at home and practiced until I got everything right.

LO1:  Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

I already used to play keyboard but to perform better, I started to identify my strengths and weaknesses. After identifying my areas of improvement, I started to focus  on the places where improvement was required, I felt a lot more aware about my performance and skills once I analysed my strengths and weaknesses, I was able to break down my skills into much smaller areas where I could provide more attention and play better. One weakness that I had was the synchronization of the notes with respect to the beat and tempo, I worked on it and have improved a lot since the initial performance.

LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

Improving my performance was the challenging aspect of this experience, playing and performing on the same level is always easy but to improve and enhance the current performance is always challenging and requires patience and determination. I haven’t done anything like this before, this was a completely new experience for me. I focused primarily on my weaknesses and gave more time into rectifying them. On the other hand I also practiced the skills that I was good at such as my coordination and dynamics. Practice was the key for me to overcome all my weaknesses and errors. I feel great about undertaking this challenge as this is a very nice opportunity for me to brush up my skills and improve upon my mistakes and weaknesses. Moreover, this experience has helped me become a better keyboardist and I can add new dimensions to the music I play from now.  It is very important to keep taking new challenges to upgrade ourselves, taking new challenges help us experience and perform activities we never thought we would be able to do. Taking new challenges help us understand our potential and our limits. 

LO4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

Performance development cannot take place overnight, it is a long process which requires immense passion, patience and determination towards improving one’s skills and enhancing performance. Perseverance and commitment was necessary throughout the experience and it will still be required to maintain that level of performance. Dedication and the will to become better was the commitment required in this experience, the project was successful only because I stuck to the commitment and played until the notes were played near perfectly. It is not very easy for me to commit to things but with regards to this activity, it was relatively easy for me to commit to it, this is because of the love and passion I have to play keyboard and to perform in front of an audience, when playing at that level, there is very little room for error which is why it was easier for me to commit to this project. Persistence and commitment are extremely important in experiences where we are developing our performance, commitment and perseverance speed up the development program and help us achieve the goal more effectively.

Final take away: The learner profile that I developed during the course of this experience was reflective and balanced, I used to play keyboard to maintain my emotional wellbeing and playing keyboard during this experience has helped me a lot to cope up with the stress of studies and assignments, as it was a performance developing experience, I used to reflect on my performance and analyse my areas of improvement and my strong points. The highlight of this experience was when I was able to play the song in sync with the beats, that was a moment of relief and success for me. This experience was a success and it did bring a huge sense of accomplishment to me, it felt empowering and made me realise the fact that if i put my heart and soul into something, then I would definitely achieve it. A learning outcome would be that breaking down complex situations into smaller segments helps us pay attention to each segment more effectively. If I did a similar plan, one thing I would do differently is that I would have a few sessions with a professional to get more accurate guidance.