Originally Posted by aeh
Delightful! Love dropping by to hear his progress.

I realize he has progressed from essentially piano reductions to true piano arrangements, so this might be perceived as a step backward in some ways, but I wonder if he might enjoy experimenting with fresh arrangements of songs (or originals) for multiple instruments. GarageBand has a surprisingly high level of functionality for this, and upgrades very smoothly to Logic, which is a professional-level tool for writing and recording. I notice that he is making very nice use of voicing to pull out distinct lines, and at some point he may find himself with an inclination/need to express more timbres and textures than can be physically managed with ten fingers and one keyboard!

Thank you for your kind feedback and suggestions Aeh. He really wants for more hours in a day.

In 2022, his final year at school, he chose music as one of his HSC subjects and composition as his major. He retrospectively learned that he was unintentionally misinformed by his high school teacher that he had to compose a piece for a small instrument group as his major work (when in fact a piano solo would have been just as acceptable), so he dedicated many potential study hours to self learn to play the guitar, in order to produce the best composition he could. He achieved an overall mark of 96 for music, but as STEM subjects are given greater weight, his marks for music were not even included in his Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) despite a disproportionately large number of hours dedicated to achieve that mark, but like speedcubing, no skill is ever a waste. He did declare that he intends to focus on the keyboard until he feels a need to stretch himself further, but I suspect with all his other commitments, that is unlikely to happen.

He would, however, benefit from being less stubborn about his use of free and subscription apps. We are financially well resourced, but he only ever uses free versions of apps and always declines my offers to pay subscriptions to upgrade his apps. He used the free version of Flat for a long time and often had to spend a lot of time to work around its limitations, but again, the effort he put into creating workarounds are honing his problem solving abilities, so as many gifted folk, especially polymaths know, no effort is ever really wasted.