Skip to main content

More Scales

Despite waking up later than usual, I managed to stick to my piano schedule this morning. I had maybe 15-20 minutes, so I dove right in to the scales for the day: F# through B, majors and minors.

As you might expect, there were a few easy ones and a few that were, well, not so easy.

Easy: F# major, G major, G minor, A-flat major, A major, A minor, B-flat major, B-flat minor, B major

Not so much: F# minor, G# minor, B minor

Oh, those minors! I'm actually doing the harmonic minors for each one, and I think that's part of what makes them tricky.

I'm also going to be doing Hanon each morning. I pulled out my old Hanon book when I first started playing again a few weeks ago. Before that, I hadn't played Hanon in years. I had one teacher, back in the early 80s, who assigned Hanon exercises ... and that's about it. Most of my teachers never assigned Hanon, and a few of them downright disliked Hanon.

My opinion? I kind of love Hanon. I like not having to think about the notes. That leaves room to focus on tone, technique, and whatever else I want to focus on.

So, speaking of focus: My focus with both Hanon and scales is to stay relaxed and focus on evenness of tone--and play at a tempo that allows me to achieve both of those goals. The "evenness of tone" area, in particular, is one where I can tell that I've regressed in 12 years of not playing.

This was a short little blog post, and I imagine they will all be short until my lessons are up and running. And since scales and Hanon are not the most exciting topics for most people, I'm probably doing my vast reading public a favor, right?

Until next time ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rusty Lock and Key

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...
Post a Comment
Read more