Dalton

Lead Imagine you’re at a rock concert watching the lead guitarist playing an awesome solo and all the crowd is cheering him on. Well, I want to be there. For my GPS project, I learned how to play the electric guitar.

A. The reason why I wanted to play electric guitar is that when I was about 12, I first got Guitar Hero 2, which is a video game where you play a virtual guitar and have to put your fingers down in rhythm with the song on the screen. I loved it and then I thought I should play real guitar. About a week later, I could play all the songs on “Guitar Hero 2” in expert mode, so I thought learning real guitar wouldn’t be that much harder.

B. I’m passionate about playing guitar because of “Guitar Hero 2”, but also because I joined orchestra this year and I got to choose to play beginner guitar with about 12 other people who also chose guitar. I’m also passionate about playing guitar because I love to listen to music – especially rock, from bands like Fallout Boy, Bullet from a Valentine, Silverstein, and Under Oath.

I knew learning guitar would be challenging for me because when I first picked up the guitar in orchestra this year, I didn’t even know what to do with it. I couldn’t even hold down the strings right without making a weird noise. It’s sometimes also hard for me to concentrate on things, so I knew it might be hard for me to pay attention to the teacher when she was teaching me.

C. My orchestra teacher, Ms. Rigdon, was kind of my mentor on this project, although she didn’t meet with me individually. She gave our entire class songs and taught us guitarists how to read tablature, which tells you what notes each string makes and gives numbers to the strings in the music. I had orchestra every other day. My other mentor for this project was the internet, especially YouTube and Ultimate Guitar Tabs. I used YouTube videos of people demonstrating where to put your fingers and how to hammer your finger on and off the strings. Ultimate Guitar Tabs gave me music and the tablature, so I could know which notes to play when.

I feel like I learned the most from the internet, actually, because the internet has unlimited possibilities of what to learn – and unlimited teachers who could provide me with the information I needed.

Through the eyes of a Gamer Imagine this. You’re at home on a big TV with 3 giant sodas and an xbox360, fast Internet, chips, Halo 3 and Call of duty Modern warfare 2. On a HD TV that’s how I feel almost all the time, at school I’m like this big tall shy kid with the flippy hair. In he Internet and Xbox live I’m that REALLY talkative kid who always owns, I must say i'm a gaming ADDICT! Whether it’s my over 40,000 kills in COD or the 250,000 kills in halo 3 I LOVE playing video games! Most people say playing video games. I think Gaming is so addicting because once you get good at it, or you don’t even need to get good at it. It’s just so much fun playing, you can do stuff you cant do in real life, like jumping 10 feet and using an explosive to jump 30 feet. In Call of Duty I find it the most addicting because you get to customize your own gun, choose your own skin color for it, and attachments, most grownups say you need to go outside and socialize, but in the video games, it’s Like real life except people are more open and you get to play video games with them. And also I can name over 20 people I know in real life that play video games, with me, almost ALL the time. I believe gaming does NOT make kids violent at all, video games to make you violent, people do just because in video game there are guns WE know not to actually do that it’s only a game. I know there are stories of people so addicted to video games that they isolate themselves everywhere else in the real world but not all gamers are like that, if your like me and you play video games all the time, I still get along perfectly at school I’m not some kind of outsider loner. You can only see this if you are a gamer were not some kind of crazy people who love killing other people and watching people die on a TV screen, we do it because of the STRATEGY we like making a plan of where your going to go, what gun you need to do the right job, how many enemies are left, to calculate how many bullets you have left to how many people are left on the other team. Some people look gaming as a way of expressing anger, I don’t even know why people say this. Sure there are some videos on youtube of little kids screaming into the microphones using cuss words, but people don’t understand the real gaming community, I actually think gaming calmed me down, when I was in elementary school I was jumping ff the walls always getting in trouble during recess and always climbing stuff I wasn’t suppose to be climbing, but when I started gaming I started calming down and just sitting in school thinking of new strategies to do when I play the game next and what kind game mode. And now I never get in trouble at school, but I do get bad grades now.