Picking Up the Pieces

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After You've Gone: Deadline Week

A few days ago, I set a hard deadline for After You’ve Gone . My plan is to make the graduation video this weekend and be done with it. After a few months of working on it, that feels like the right call. I’ve learned so much—stride tenths, coordination, some improvisation vocabulary—and I even used some of the ideas in YAMS . By any reasonable standard, the Piano With Jonny "After You've Gone" course has done its job. There's still a part of me that really wants to be able to perform it, and that's where my struggle has been for the past few weeks. And I feel like I'm not even close. I Think This Is What Happens When a Piece Is Too Hard This piece has never quite settled for me. The arrangement section still feels slippery. I can play the rolling tenths, but it feels like my fingers are wearing roller skates—nothing is fully grounded. (Maybe it's my smaller-than-average hands.) And even though I switch to the easier four-on-the-floor for the solo/improv...

Ode to Joy Day 3: Patterns, Shapes, and Short Breaks

As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...

On Second Thought ... Diminishing Returns

In today's live Q&A, Jonny May said something that stuck with me, and not in a good way: "If a piece takes you more than two months to learn, it’s probably too hard for you." Hoo boy. That didn’t sit well. I can’t even remember the last time I learned anything in under two months unless it was something relatively simple, like the Chopin A minor waltz. My immediate reaction was: Wait… am I constantly working on pieces that are too hard? My previous (classical) teachers took almost the opposite approach. Deborah encouraged me to reach beyond my limits—to stretch, to struggle a bit, to take on things that felt just out of reach. And I do think that made me better. But I also have to admit something: I’ve been struggling a lot. The Case of After You’ve Gone First of all, After You've Gone wasn’t meant to be a performance piece. It was supposed to be a training piece—a way to work on stride, coordination, and improvisation. Here’s how that went: It took about two mon...

After You've Gone: Getting Close

Folks, I’m getting close. I'm not there yet, but something has finally shifted with the solo section. It's like I’ve been on a long C-curve, improving at a glacial pace, and then suddenly… it’s starting to sound like music. I’m still under tempo, but even when I push it a bit, the crashes and freeze-ups are happening far less often. What’s really encouraging is that I’ve started to build a small vocabulary—riffs, I suppose—that I can rely on for certain progressions. I’ve got a couple for F6–Fm6, one cheeky one for C6–F7, and a nice descending idea for Em7–A7. I move into syncopated blocked chords for both C6–E7–Am7–D7 and Gm7–C9, and I’ve got two riffs that work over Dm7–G7. For everything else, I’m mostly outlining the chord or using blocked chords, but even there, a few ideas are starting to show up. This has been a bit of a lightbulb moment. The riffs aren’t just “nice ideas”; they're doing real work, reducing real cognitive load. Instead of trying to invent something f...

Ode to Joy: The "Before" Performance

This is not really a performance. It’s a sight-read—my second pass through Jonny May’s Ode to Joy . I first sight-read it yesterday while trying to figure out which sections would be the most challenging. Today I played it once more for the "before" video. I’m posting it as a reminder: every piece I eventually play well starts like this. Slow, uneven, and occasionally unrecognizable as music. What I’m Actually Working Toward My main goal with this piece is to collect arranging “tools.” But I also want to learn the piece itself, because it’s too good not to. Right now, it sounds great when Jonny plays it . I assume it will also sound good when I play it, and hopefully it will feel great once it's under my hands. That said, this won’t be quick. The left-hand jumps are manageable, but the right hand stays busy, and the tempo seriously moves. A Rough Time Estimate Difficulty-wise, Ode to Joy feels comparable to pieces like Jingle Bells Rag , America the Beautiful , or maybe ...

Goodbyes and Hellos

The past week of my piano life has been a bit out of the ordinary. For one thing, it was spring break, and we spent five days in Pensacola Beach, Florida. I'd hoped to pack the 61-key Yamaha, but there was no room—which was probably for the best, since I got a surprising amount of practice-adjacent work done. On the 7-hour drive down, I did a harmonic analysis of Jonny May's Ode To Joy, which I'll begin learning to play in earnest once I've graduated from After You've Gone (soon!). It took a while, but it was such a good use of time, and I never would have done it with a keyboard in front of me. Once I'd written it all out, I grouped the chords into recognizable patterns, labeled the sections, and added notes to make the analysis easier to navigate. (For any music theoreticians looking at this, I can promise you it isn't a perfect analysis!) Then I listened to Jonny's arrangement while reading along ... and wow, what a different perspective that gave...