Picking Up the Pieces

March: Where the Plans Went Awry March is almost over, and my spreadsheet tells a pretty clear story: I missed most of my targets. I had planned to spend 65% of my time on Core work, split evenly between Foundations, Skills, and After You’ve Gone. In reality, Core ended up at 49% , and within that, Skills took over, with modulation and transposition getting most of my attention. Foundations and After You’ve Gone got the short shrift. In hindsight, the reasons aren’t all that complicated. First, I picked up “Danny Boy,” which wasn’t in the plan . It’s built on the Misty progression, so I told myself it could count toward Foundations, but most of the actual work was on modulation and transposition. So Skills ballooned, and everything else got squeezed out. And then I ended up dropping "Danny Boy" after all, so now that feels like it was wasted time (though it was good to work on the skills). Second, YAMS took more time than expected. It ended up at about a third of my practic...

It is so good to be back in "After You’ve Gone." I was a little afraid the three-week break would undo everything, but the first section is still there. I think that’s a testament to the effectiveness of the practice techniques I’ve picked up from Piano With Rebecca B and Molly Gebrian . This week I’m back in the solo section. The idea here is pretty straightforward: build the right-hand melody mostly from the notes already sitting in the left-hand chords. I really like this approach: fewer decisions, more actual playing. I made this short practice video yesterday, walking through where I am in the process. This phase of the AYG journey makes me really appreciate how Piano With Jonny structures things. It’s not that the steps are easy—they’re not—but they’re broken down in a way that makes them doable. First, block the right-hand chords while keeping a steady, blocked four-on-the-floor pattern in the left hand. Then start breaking up the right hand—one or two notes at a ti...

After writing down my new "required" and "optional" lists for the lead sheet courses , I realized I'd literally done everything on the list for Lead Sheets Lesson 6. And I thought I had at least two more weeks to go before I'd be ready to move on. So last night, instead of having a standard practice session on Lesson 6, I made this video, shared it with the PWJ group, and called it a day. I also decided to axe the Danny Boy Challenge . The music is so beautiful, but the intermediate version doesn't feel challenging enough (hence my desire to "make it my own project"), and the advanced version ... well, I don't want to say it's too hard, because I could sit down and play it from the sheet music right now. But the concepts—extensions, alterations, etc.—are beyond what I'm learning now, and it just took too much mental energy to both play it and understand it (much less transpose it). This time next year I'll have a better handle ...

I've been working through the Lead Sheet Level 4 courses for a while now, transposing to multiple keys, experimenting with different styles, doing some improvisation (or what might pass for it). But I keep getting stuck on one question: when is it okay to move on to the next lesson? I never feel like what I have is good enough, though I'm aware I tend to hold myself to absurdly high standards when it comes to piano. I just want someone, anyone, to say, "OK, Nina, you've done enough. Move on."  What Jonny Said  I asked Jonny about this at this week's Ask Jonny show. His response was completely valid: when to move on really depends on your goals. Which sent me back to think harder about what my goals actually are and how these courses relate to them.  My Relationship with These Courses  The lead sheet courses focus heavily on jazz ... but jazz really isn't my thing. So these lessons have been kind of like Brussels sprouts: I do them because I know they'r...

The PWJ recital was Thursday, and I rocked my YAMS performance! It wasn't perfect, but I barely paused and just kept moving forward. Jonny had very nice things to say—he always does, even if you made a ton of mistakes—but he also said I was playing at a professional level, and I will happily accept that compliment. The video was just posted (I may have checked for it dozens of times a day since the recital), and I finally watched my performance. It sounded better in my memory than in reality, which probably shouldn't be surprising. The piano sound quality wasn't great either, so that was a little disappointing. The performance is still good, though, and I’ll share it here if/when it becomes publicly available. For now, you just get a picture from it. (Not a video, just a recital photo) Why did I leave the cat toy in the background? Why didn't I wear something more flattering? Why do I have to look like such a middle-aged suburban mom? Why, why why? YAMS Fallow Period Fo...

Are y'all tired of reading about my You Are My Sunshine progress yet? No? Excellent. I will continue. This week is recital week. Yesterday was my "dry run" recital with the Piano with Rebecca B group. Tomorrow is the PWJ Student Recital. PwRB Performance Report I crashed and burned. Maybe that's an overstatement. At the time it felt like crashing and burning. Perhaps more accurately, I stumbled, recovered, stumbled again, and kept moving forward—which, really, counts as a kind of success. The tempo held together, more or less. (Though I'm scared to watch the video Rebecca kindly posted after the recital.) The piece never fully unraveled. But the mistakes were persistent—and oddly placed, showing up in spots that usually sound fine in practice. The finale, in particular, went rogue. I landed solidly on a completely wrong chord at one point, and at the very end I forgot to finish on the high octave for the final downward gliss. So I ended in the middle of the keyboa...