Project Essay

20 Percent Project Speech

This year, I worked on a project that would last the whole year, and hopefully my whole life. While I didn’t quite reach my goal, I still completed my project. For my 20 percent time project, I learned how to play guitar. It took me a while to actually get a guitar, and it took me a while to actually pick it up and play. About a month ago, I had my first guitar lesson.

At first, I was determined to teach myself to play. I wanted to be able to just jump in and play all these different kinds of songs, but as the time went on, I began to realize that I couldn’t teach myself. I then asked my mom to get me lessons, and the next week I had my first lesson. By this time, I thought I would’ve had at least one song down (not counting “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). I’ve gone a little slower than planned, but I have learned the basics of guitar.

So far, I have learned to play some chords, how to play up and down the scale, and a few short songs. I’ve also learned that guitar is nothing like piano. I thought reading music for guitar would be like reading music for piano, but instead of notes, there are numbers on each line. The staff of a guitar has different notes than piano, too. What I still would like to learn is how to play full songs, and hopefully it won’t take much longer ‘til I learn how.

One of the challenges that I’ve had with this project is actually getting a guitar. I didn’t actually get a guitar until Christmas, which took up half of my time to do my project. When I did start playing guitar, I began to get frustrated. I would get angry because I couldn’t teach myself how to play and when I tried to play a note, it wouldn’t sound right. It took me a while to realize that I couldn’t teach myself, but when I finally did, there was only enough time for about a month of lessons.

My biggest accomplishment was probably coming up with the project. My parents have always wanted me to play guitar, so I thought this would be the perfect time to learn. Even though I didn’t spend as much time on my project as I was supposed to, I have started on it, and hopefully will continue to play. I also think my biggest accomplishment was deciding to get lessons. I can be pretty stubborn, so I’m glad that I realized that I needed help learning to play.

I really enjoyed this project. I’m glad that I was able to pick up a guitar and learn how to play. I never really had the desire to play guitar, and at first I only wanted to do this because I couldn’t come up with anything else to do for my project. Now that I’ve begin to play, I realized how fun it is and how much I’ve enjoyed it. I haven’t learned much, but I hope that I will be able to continue playing guitar, and learn a lot more. This project helped me start something I love to do, and I’m thankful for it.