Picking Up the Pieces

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to  IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

I bit the bullet. I signed up for the Piano With Jonny Student Recital on Thursday, March 19. It’s in the middle of the workday, which means I’ll either be working from home with a very strategic “lunch break” or taking the day off entirely. Given how busy things have been lately, I kind of like the idea of a day off. What will I play? "You Are My Sunshine," of course! I’ve known for a while that the only way this arrangement will ever reach the finish line is if I give it a hard deadline. Otherwise, it remains "this fun thing I'm working on" forever. Now it has to become something real . Like the velveteen rabbit. So I have five weeks to prepare. I think that's enough time. Thinking Strategically Last night I divided the arrangement into 13 sections and tried to rate each one from 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “needs serious work” and 5 meaning “performance-ready.” The rating system fell apart pretty quickly, though. Some sections are musically finished but not d...

This was the best I could do for my "graduation" video. St. Louis Blues is now officially a maintenance piece. It's something I can play on maintenance days and also as a technique-style warmup for practicing the blues scale. I'm thinking I can also use it for a transposing exercise. (Everything is a potential transposing exercise these days!) As I played this rendition of St. Louis Blues, I could practically feel the small, fussy spirits of certain former piano teachers perched on my shoulders. Sit still. Don’t sway. The music is not about your body. Every time I leaned into the groove, one of them wobbled. By the time I hit the last chorus, I’m pretty sure a few had fallen off entirely. Anyway, I love this piece. It's so much fun. And yes, I'm dancing--and maybe I'd play those runs more cleanly if I weren't. But this is blues, not Bach, and being in the groove matters more than getting all the notes right.

Tall Nick (the new piano) and I did not get along very well this weekend. Several of my projects (Lead Sheets Lesson 4, After You've Gone, and St. Louis Blues) felt ready for a video I could share on PWJ. So I decided that on Saturday, in addition to practicing my maintenance pieces, I would make a few videos. Ha. Haha. I could write about my adventures with all three would-be videos, but I'll limit this blog post to After You've Gone. Saturday morning, with the family gone and the house all to myself for many glorious hours, I sat down at Tall Nick, ready to record a good progress video of After You’ve Gone. It was a reasonable goal; I’d been working on the left-hand stride and right-hand melody for a couple of weeks. I had it by memory and felt comfortable with it. I was basically there . Ha. Haha. What followed was a familiar spiral: take after take, none of them good. I would get lost after the first measure, or I'd make it through the whole song and then crash and ...

January is St. Louis Blues Challenge Month at PWJ! I actually started this challenge about six months ago , got frustrated, and moved on to other things without finishing it. The challenge itself isn’t so hard, but I just could not get the G minor blues improv under my fingers. When the challenge was announced on January 1, I decided to revisit it. Now that I’m learning more about transposing, I thought maybe I could finally come to peace with this G minor blues. As is my wont, I no longer seem capable of just playing what’s written. Instead of simply playing the 12-bar A-section arrangement (which is all the challenge requires), I’ve created a whole combobulation: Intro from PWJ Blues Endings 1 course (ending on D7) 12-bar A section (the actual challenge) 12-bar B section (using a lead sheet) A-section repeat 12-bar solo using runs from PWJ 10-Lesson Blues Challenge 2 course A-section repeat with octave displacement throughout 12 bars of unstructured jamming (chords, rolls, general ma...

Well, I’ve been having some fun with ChatGPT. I regularly use ChatGPT to help me define my piano goals for each month (and for the year), and to determine how much time to devote to each. I’ve also asked some philosophical questions about my move from classical student to ragtime/stride/blues pianist. And I ask lots of theory-related questions, and ragtime-related questions, and… well, that’s my primary use of ChatGPT. I’ve also asked questions relating to my work—not so much about how certain things work, but things like “Can you proofread this email?” and “Does this revision make sense from an engineering standpoint?” It’s been helpful, though at times I’ve had to say, “No, that’s not how that works.” And then ChatGPT responds with, “You’re exactly right to call out my mistake.” Conversations like that make me wary of trusting its “knowledge” too much. Anyway, people have been posting ChatGPT caricatures of themselves lately, so I thought I’d have some fun. I asked it to make a caric...