Picking Up the Pieces

I did not see this coming. On Wednesday after work, I headed north to Brevard, NC, where my parents live. My mom was getting cataract surgery Thursday morning, and even though my sister lives here in Brevard, my mom wanted me here to stay with my dad while she was getting surgery. So I packed my laptop (so I could work remotely) and my 61-key Yamaha keyboard (so I could at least do some minor 7th and blues improvisation exercises). I got a good bit of work done (I had to), but I honestly didn't expect to get much done on piano. Boy, was I wrong. Looking for "Amazing Grace" I wanted to play "Amazing Grace" for my dad. Even though I can play it by ear, I wanted to find a good arrangement. I was looking ... and then it dawned on me that Piano With Jonny probably had one. Well, they have a whole course on how to play Amazing Grace in a gospel blues style! Not only that, but they have it in intermediate and advanced versions! My time to learn something new was limit

As I mentioned in my previous post, I asked Eric to suggest a not-long piece that would stretch me to just a little beyond my current capability. He suggested this. Oh my. That looks and sounds hard. I looked up the level, and it is listed as Grade 11 on the Piano Syllabus site . For comparison, Maple Leaf Rag and Chopin's F Minor Nocturne are both Grade 8. The Mozart that I want to learn is Grade 7. [Note: I think "grade levels" are often arbitrary because simple pieces can have difficult elements, and vice-versa. But at the same time, they can be useful to get an idea of what I might enjoy learning, and what I might be able to learn in a set amount of time.] Am I Ready for a Grade 11 Piece? My gut answer is "no." Even though my other piece will be a Grade 7, I don't know if it's wise for me to take on something so difficult. (Also, keep in mind that I'm working on "Bare Necessities" too, which has its own challenges.) If I really, really

I had a piano lesson yesterday. It was my first lesson in six weeks, thanks to multiple planned and unplanned schedule changes. Six weeks ago, I was still working on how to interpret the "Mad Chase" section of Chopin, and I hadn't put any serious work into the final page yet. I was still fine-turning "Misty" and was just noodling around with Bare Necessities. I was crawling through Maple Leaf Rag and working to memorize the D section. And my adventure into minor sevenths was still three weeks into the future. A lot has happened in six weeks. Forty-five blog posts' worth of stuff! We went a few minutes over at yesterday's lesson, which is supposed to last a half-hour. I was glad Eric could go over because I really wanted the opportunity to cover both Chopin and Maple Leaf. Chopin and Piano-Lesson Piano Woes I played Chopin first. I'll begin by saying that I don't like the piano used in the lesson. It's a Kawai (I think) spinet, and it always s

A few days ago, I wrote about my lack of enthusiasm for minor sevenths , my Level 4 Foundations focus for the month at Piano With Jonny . At the end of that post, I wrote that I might try to "improvise/compose something, maybe, that manages to be based in minor sevenths without sounding lost and listless." Sunday night when we got home from the volleyball party, I myself was feeling a little lost and listless. I'm not sure why. Part of it is I'm sad that yet another club volleyball season is over. I was also tired, and my teen daughter and I weren't getting along, and ... I just felt sad. Even though it was after 9pm on a Sunday night, I sat down to practice for a few minutes ... but nothing was working. Not only that, I didn't feel like practicing anything. I wasn't in the mood for happy, bouncy ragtime, so no Maple Leaf Rag or Bare Necessities. My Chopin Nocturne would have matched my mood, but I didn't want to think that hard. I just wanted to play

In my goals last Friday, I mentioned, half-jokingly, that I dream of the day when I happen to be in the vicinity of a grand piano with a ready-made audience . Well, readers, that very thing happened last night. And the others wanted to play "Heart and Soul" ... so we played "Heart and Soul." It was fun, as I don't think of any of us had participated in a "Heart and Soul" duet (or trio) since we were kids. But the ready-made-piano-dream-in-my-head-with-an-audience didn't happen. I did get to rush through "Maple Leaf Rag" at the very end. It was almost time to leave, and I was tired and made all kinds of mistakes, so that was a little disappointing. But it did feel good to play a real, acoustic grand. This party was an end-of-season party for my daughter's volleyball team and families. In the video, I'm playing the melody in the treble. Our middle blocker's dad is in the middle, and our outside hitter's mom is in the bass. (

In my quest to build muscle memory as well as ear/mind memory in the Transcendence, I'm engaging in fast-practice techniques. Friday morning I worked with the metronome and found myself focusing so hard on the notes that I forgot the pedal ... and realized I was playing Chopin like it was stride piano. Readers, it was fun. As I increase the tempo on the metronome, I continued to play stride-style. There is a time and a place, certainly, for working on dynamics, rubato, pedaling, and such ... but there's also a time and place to simply get the hands used to playing the right notes, regardless of all those other things. And it was fun. Here's the video, in case you ever wondered what Chopin sounds like as a stride piano piece! (If Chopin in stride style makes you cringe, be comforted in the fact that I play it properly at the end of the video!)

Thursday night I had a not-particularly-satisfying practice on the Transcendence, mainly working in rhythms. (See this post for the gory details.) Friday morning, I decided to see if a good night's sleep had helped at all. And, surprise! I had a small breakthrough. Or maybe just a realization. I've consistently played the wrong note (a B-flat instead of a D-flat) in this one measure, and even though I'd drilled it to death the night before, I was still missing it in my morning practice. So I decided to play through the section, saying the name of each bass note out loud as I played them. By doing this, I realized that the bass uses the same five-note pattern twice in a row. Eureka! (For something that should have been obvious to me from the beginning!) Ah well, better late than never. And now I'll have my eyes and ears open for patterns like this as I learn future pieces.

The last few times I've played through the Chopin Nocturne, I've felt a bit of uncertainty creep in with the Transcendence . Instead of stopping and focusing on the source of uncertainty, I've just been playing through it in the hopes that it will go away. Of course, it doesn't go away. So last night I decided it was time. I needed to deal with the Transcendence. I mean, it's the most beautiful, and the most difficult, part of the entire nocturne. Why does Chopin do this to me? "Yeah, you can play this beautiful, transcendent passage, but you're going to have to put in the time. A lot of time." I made a series of videos that I'm just going to share in a few separate posts on this blog. They involve several different approaches to practicing/learning this section (which I thought I had already learned!!). The videos in this post are from last night, and the videos in the next two posts are from this morning. Last night's focus was on practicing

I am feeling very "TGIF" today! We've had a lot going on this week, and my piano practice time has been spotty. It's also managed to be quite productive ... more on that in another post. I have a moderately busy weekend ahead of me. Tonight is a rec volleyball game, and then tomorrow I want to buy/plant the flowers that we never got around to planting last weekend. And then we have a volleyball practice Saturday afternoon, church Sunday, and a club volleyball end-of-season party that will take up most of Sunday afternoon. These are all good things and I'm looking forward to all of them (except maybe the yard work ... I don't love yard work). But I will need to make a concerted effort to make time for piano. The Goals Here are my SMART goals for the weekend: SCALES: Finish my week-long deep dive into A Major/F# Minor and move on to E Major/C# minor . For some reason, this week hasn't felt like a deep dive into these scales. Maybe it's because A Major i

Let me begin by saying that I love major sevenths. My favorite chord in the world is the humble C major seventh. I don't have perfect pitch, so I don't know why it has to be C major seventh and not some other major seventh ... but something about C major seventh just hits me the right way. Resonates, you might say. And of course I like dominant  sevenths. Who doesn't like dominant sevenths? I even love diminished and half-diminished  sevenths. They're intense. They're suspenseful. They have personality, even if they're not kind and friendly the way the major and dominant sevenths are. They have bite . But minor  sevenths? Ugh. No, not ugh. Minor sevenths are fine ... in small doses. In context. As a quick stopover before moving on to a dominant seventh a fourth up. As a place to hang out before moving to something more solid. But taking a month-long deep dive into the minor sevenths? Ugh. Let me explain. Minor sevenths make me sad . Listless. They give me this w

Last Night's Practice: Last night I worked on that nasty diminished-seventh part of the Maple Leaf Rag "C" section , and I got a little frustrated. I'm doing a much better job of not flexing my thumb back, but now it's like my thumb doesn't know what to do. When I practice slowly, it tucks under like a good thumb, but when I speed up, it sort of freezes, thinking, "I know I'm not supposed to stick way out, but ... now what was I supposed to do again?" It ended up not feeling like a great practice. I was still struggling with thumb issues, and when I played through individual sections, I was missing notes left and right. I went to bed feeling a little down about the whole thing. I love this music so much, and I really want to be able to play it well. This Morning: Thinking in Terms of Dixieland Jazz My plan for this morning was to work on Chopin, but Maple Leaf wouldn't leave me alone. As I was getting ready for work, I listened to some tradit

This morning I found myself with an unexpected 45 (or so) minutes for practice. "Bare Necessities" was needing some love, so I committed then and there to devote my full practice time to it. I spent about 25 minutes on Stride Section B and about 20 minutes on Ragtime Section A. The videos below are from the Stride Section B practice. For the most part, it sounds pretty smooth, but there are just a few little areas that are still dogging me, preventing me from playing it at the same tempo as I'm playing Stride Section A. In these videos, I work through one of those sections. Or at least I demonstrate how I work through these kinds of problems. Throughout these videos, I talk like the Southern country bumpkin that I am, saying "Ah" instead of "I," and "Ah'm gonna" instead of "I'm going to." What can I say, I've lived in Georgia for 7 years, and before that, North Carolina, and before that, Louisiana. I'm going to sound

I'm working hard on relaxing my thumb, as well as strengthening my other fingers, via thumb-tucking. (I keep wanting to type "thumb-sucking," or "thumb-tacking".) And this weekend I made the brilliant deduction that Hanon is ideal for working on this kind of thing. I've gone through phases with Hanon. Some of my piano teachers haven't used it, while others made it a central part of my technique work. My latest piano teacher, Carol, who taught me in 2019-2020 (before my COVID wrecked everything and tendinitis wrecked my elbow), loved Hanon. With her, I was coming back to piano after about 10 years away, so we started with the first 20 exercises and then skipped over to various exercises for trills, scales in thirds, etc. (I was just starting scales in thirds when my piano life ground to a halt.) I hadn't thought about Hanon at all until a week or so ago when I listened to Dominic Cheli's lecture and worked on the octave exercises. (I wrote about t

I stumbled upon yet another breakthrough while working on Maple Leaf Rag the other night. It's related to the thumb-tuck technique that I learned about on the Ms. Lindsey YouTube channel . There is one part near the end of Maple Leaf Rag "C Section" (I hate calling it the "C Section," so I sometimes refer to it as the "Trio," which is actually its proper name) that has given me trouble from the moment I learned it. I don't have bar numbers with me, but it's the section with the broken diminished G chord in the left hand, which immediately jumps down to an A-flat octave. There are a few problems with this section: (1) Because of the big jumps immediately preceding it, my hand is already tense/tired by the time I get to it. (2) The jump from "5 on G"  to "1 an octave down on A-flat while playing the octave" is awkard, particularly at tempo. (3) My stupid thumb won't stay down! So Thursday night, I decided to very delibera

It has been a good week for piano, and I'm looking forward to working in some good practice time this weekend. I won't get to have a monster practice weekend like I did last weekend, but I still hope to get a total of four or five hours in. I'll need to balance that with a few other things, though. One, I have a volleyball practice Saturday morning (I assistant-coach a rec team), and then I need to go pick my daughter up from a sleepover. After that, I'll probably spend some quality time with my daughter since she's been gone all week. We're also planning to plant the flowerbeds, so that will include at least one trip to Lowe's (though probably more), plus quite a bit of ourdoor work. So, I'm going to be tired, and my hands will probably be tired from digging and planting. Realistically, I should be able to practice an hour or two tonight, an hour or two early tomorrow morning, and an hour or two Sunday afternoon or evening. The Piano Goals What will I d

Yes, friends, my “Breakthrough Week” even includes a breakthrough on scales. According to my handy-dandy practice journal, I started working on scales again in late February, which was about six weeks into my grand return to the piano life, and about a month into my Tonebase and PWJ memberships. My Scale Routine I generally start my morning practice with about 10 minutes of scales and my evening practice (if there’s time with just a few minutes of scales). Either way, here’s what I do for both major scales and harmonic minor scales: 2 octaves in similar motion going up, and then 2 octaves in contrary motion, and then 2 octaves in similar motion going down Using the metronome, as of last week, I could do all of the major scales in this way at about 80 bpm, and most of the harmonic minors at about 60, though some of them (a.k.a., the black-note keys) were giving me trouble. (BTW, I don’t do scales in thirds or sixths. I don’t know why. I just never have.) For the past month or so, I’ve b

I recently stumbled upon Lindsey Gallagher's YouTube channel , and it is a hoot. She is a pianist, Suzuki piano teacher, comedian, and self-proclaimed " Jonny May  fangirl." Not only did she make laugh about 500 times in the hour that I binged-watched her channel, and not only did she cause me to realize that I, too, am something of a Jonny May fangirl, but she's developed some helpful videos on Suzuki piano technique, starting with The Suzuki Method: Ergonomics of Piano Technique . The technique that intrigued me the most was "thumb-tucking," which she also discusses in this video . Now, I took piano from a Suzuki-certified teacher when I lived in Asheville, and while I remember her always telling me I needed "soft thumbs," I don't remember learning about thumb-tucking. (It's possible she beat the idea of thumb-tucking into me multiple times, and I simply wasn't ready/willing to listen or apply. Whatever happened or didn't happen,

My plan for today was to post about my scales breakthrough. I've actually already written the post; the only thing missing is the videos to demonstrate how fabulously I'm playing the D major and B harmonic minor scales. Alas, yesterday at work, I was having a lot of hand pain while typing. This happens on a semi-regular basis, and it's weird--I don't have (or I don't notice) any hand pain at the piano, but at times it's almost impossible to type at work because of the aching in the back of my right hand, mainly from just above the middle of my wrist up to the bases of my fingers. Last night I sat down to practice, and ... it wasn't happening. At least not to the degree I'd planned. I ended up doing a good bit of left-hand work on the "Mad Chase" section of Chopin , as well as some review/repetition on the stride section of Bare Necessities ... and that was it. I wasn't going to touch Maple Leaf or the Bare Necessities ragtime section with

Today's breakthrough moment (there are actually two of them) focuses on "Bare Necessities." As you'll remember, I discovered Jonny May's arrangement back in early March and immediately decided to learn it. I printed out the music, started the course, and proceeded to learn the stride section, posting a few videos of my progress. Ha. I bet those videos make it look like I was making progress. I guess I was ... but not really. And I realized something this weekend that I hadn't before: Because I was thinking of "Bare Necessities" as a "fun" piece, I wasn't practicing it seriously or diligently. I wasn't treating it as something I wanted to master. This mindset might work with an easier piece, but this arrangement isn't easy. The result: despite a little progress at the outset, I wasn't moving forward. I was stalled. Breakthrough #1 The first breakthrough was realizing that if I truly want to learn this piece and play it well,

Continuing with the breakthrough theme of the week, here's a bit about my blues breakthrough from Sunday afternoon. Earlier this year, when I first resurrected this blog, I wrote about how I want to be able to sit at the piano and be able to improvise stuff and not have it sound like crap . Well, maybe I didn't use those exact words. And So I Dove Right into Jazz Studies ... I started revisiting my 2-5-1 progressions, then added color tones .  I found a very nice jazz piano teacher online and also discovered the Piano With Jonny website . I gamely took on  PWJ's "Misty" challenge , would would include guidance on jazz solo techniques. I listened and listened and listened to the great jazz pianists, and any other jazz pianist that Spotify's algorithm would spit out at me. Alas ... I could not find the enthusiasm I needed to do all of this. After hours of jazz-listening, I always had to give myself a good 15-20 minutes of Bach because all of the rootless voicing

Oh, Maple Leaf. Where to begin? At the Beginning I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I learned the A and B sections of Maple Leaf Rag back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you if it was early, mid- or late 90s, but it was during those 10 years after I’d graduated college, when I was playing a good bit of piano but not taking regular lessons from anyone. I don’t remember teaching it to myself at all. I just know that, at some point, the first half of Maple Leaf Rag was part of my two- or three-song repertoire of pieces I’d be able to play by memory over the next 25 years. It was always sloppy and I knew it, but people loved it, and so I played it if there was ever a piano around. Back in January, I decided to properly re-learn those two sections, and to finally learn the C and D sections of this wonderful piece. I worked on these over the next month or two, learning (and-relearning) the notes pretty quickly ... but it took time to memorize, and also to get everything to tempo surpassing a

I had the most amazing weekend. Each member of our family did their own thing: The husband went to Ohio to see a rock concert with some old friends, the kid went to Atlanta to visit a camp friend, and I stayed home to cuddle the cats, do some spring cleaning, and (mostly) practice the piano. (According to my piano journal spreadsheet, I put in a total of about nine and a half hours between Friday night and Sunday night.) And it was glorious . I also had a number of breakthroughs this weekend. This blog post is more of a round-up of my progress, but I'll be writing more about the breakthroughs throughout the week. What I Worked On Friday night was mostly devoted to Maple Leaf Rag and Bare Necessities. On Saturday, I spent about a half-hour on minor sevenths, and then almost an hour on two scales: D Major and B Harmonic Minor. More on that in a scales-centric post later this week. After that, I dove deep into Chopin for several hours, taking the occasional break to do enough spring c

I know I mentioned previously that I'm now tracking my practice time. I've only been tracking it for about a month, but ... wow! I can't believe I've never done this before. Not Just a Piano Nerd Friends, I am not just a piano nerd. I'm also an Excel spreadsheet nerd, I've decided to track much more than just how much time I'm devoting to each piece/skill. Leaderboards I now have a daily leaderboard so I can make sure I'm not spending too much time each day on the same piece. It's not that I have to spend and equal amount of time on everything, but I do tend to go through phases of focusing on one particular piece while forgetting the others exist, and this will help prevent that. I'm going to have a weekly leaderboard, too. Just because. And heck, maybe I'll end up with monthly and yearly leaderboards. Because leaderboards are fun! Also, because I am a nerd, I am marking the "leaders" in yellow highlight. Other Stuff I'm Tracki

Is it already time to think about goals again? Recap of the Past Week Last week was a mess, pianistically speaking! I was out of town and had only my 61-key keyboard for practice, so you may remember that I decided to take a big break from both Chopin and Maple Leaf (and, it turned out, Bare Necessities). Virtually all of my keyboard practice was devoted to the blues shuffle and scale exercises . It was time well-spent, but it was also a big interruption to my usual routine. It also didn't help that we had a volleyball tournament that lasted most of the weekend. That was lots of fun, but, again, not great for piano practice!   A few days ago, I looked at the number of hours I'd spent on each piece/project in March , and I was a little surprised to see how erratic my work has been with both Chopin and Maple Leaf Rag. I've had some productive practice sessions, but they haven't been super-consistent. So I've started keeping a spreadsheet to make sure I'm more c

I had some free time in a waiting room, so I added up my practice hours for March. I updated my March Goals Recap with the total number of hours (50.45), but I thought I'd share the breakdowns here. I spent almost a quarter (23%, or 11.8 hours) of my total practice time on Chopin ... which is interesting because I practiced Chopin only 18 days in March! This was a surprise to me. I would have guess that I'd practiced it every day, except for the few days I was in North Carolina and had only a 61-key keyboard to work with. Only 18 days! Next in the ranking is the Blues Learning Track at PWJ. I started on March 6, but I didn't really start working in it until March 10. I made it through the first three lessons and ended up devoting a full 8.9 hours of practice time over 17 days to the blues. When I was NC and only had that little keyboard, I only worked on the blues--mainly playing the blues scale over the easy and medium shuffles. A full 16% (8 hours) of practice time went