We would meet in a small music room with Ami and Masaya, and sometimes some of their mutual friends would join. In my opinion, Masaya was a guitarist God (meaning he was really excellent at guitar) and he helped me learn about strum patterns; this was a part of guitar playing that was new to me. A strum pattern is the way you strum a guitar up and down. The strum pattern we used was down, down, up, up, down, and up. I learned this first, before I began to learn the chords, which was hard to do. Then, I learned the chords for Happy Birthday, which were C, G7, G7, C, C, G7 and C. Following that, the next session I had was combining the strum pattern with the chords, which was also difficult. Finally, I learned to play it with Masaya playing also and Ami singing along. It was a great experience, and after two months of practice, I was ready for our performance.
The performance was set on Janurary 6th at 5:30pm at Day Dream Kichijoji, which is a live music venue. I was not nervous, but I was scared I was going to mess up the chords since I had to play the C chord 12 times before I started the Happy Birthday song. A lot of my friends showed up and I went to the backstage to practice before going on stage. When I finally went up on stage, I played the Happy Birthday song and a solo part playing the first half of Spanish Romance. I enjoyed the opportunity to have performed and be taught, and I could not have done it without going to study abroad.
