Perfect (Tanu Deshmukh) - Ed Sheeran (Guitar Cover)
04-Sep-23
Tanu is a very shy, quiet, and silent child. She will never ask questions, she will not back answer, and I can't even imagine her retaliating, at least not in class. But the one thing she hates is being called an 'Aunty', which I tease her with quite frequently.
I thought Tanu's song was quite easy, 4 chords, 2 strumming patterns, and done, but that was not the case. After teaching her half the song I discovered that the chord progression for the chorus is different than the rest of the song. This posed a slight challenge for her, but Tanu faced it like a brave girl. Mastering the metronome was the biggest challenge Tanu faced and took 3 months to be proficient with it. And it's my job to constantly push students out of their comfort zone to make sure they are learning complicated and difficult things. So I gave Tanu 3 separate strumming patterns, although the song would have sounded better with just 2. My goal is not just to make the song sound good, but also to ensure the student is achieving better control over their techniques.
And then, after 10 months, Tanu was ready with her song, tight on the metronome, good chord-shifting, and amazing control over the strumming patterns. But we faced a different problem, my vocal stamina had gone completely down. I couldn't sing the song more than once. The song's scale was just out of my vocal range. This is where I delayed the song's recording for 3 months. Thank you Tanu for being patient with my delay. I dropped the song's scale by 1 semitone so that it would be easier for me to sing. But it still wasn't enough to hit the high notes. Khushi does a pretty amazing impression of me shouting that part. So, I decided to sing the high parts with a falsetto and then the song was set. It still took me 3 months to train the falsetto-to-normal shifting and build my stamina to sing the song 10 times. And I'm happy that on the day of the recording, I didn't lose my vocal stamina. We ended up recording more than 10 takes. I made completely different mistakes during the recording. The only reason I played the guitar with Tanu was because I was making vocal and lyrical mistakes without my guitar. Otherwise, Tanu is completely capable of playing the song with my assistance and her control over the tempo is amazing.
Thank you again Tanu Aunty, for being extremely patient with me.
