Gonna Show Y'all Some Videos of Mah "Bare Necessities" Practice

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 Southern. :)

Anyway, here are the videos, each with an intro in poorly written Southern dialect:

Bare Necessities Practice I - Ah play through Stride Section B at 76 and git to one of those spots (a G minor chord) where ah always pause.

Bare Necessities Practice II - Ah work rilly hard on that one li'l section.

Bare Necessities Practice III - Ah play through Stride Section B again after workin' rilly hard on that li'l section. At about 1:42, ah hit the section that ah worked on in Video #2 above.

I hope that is readable. I hope my voice is listenable. I hope these videos prove helpful (maybe) to other pianists out there.

Comments

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 ...

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 ...

Well.

It looks like "A Sort of Notebook" is an ex-blog. I'm not going to post a link to it because it's been taken over by spammers. It's Saturday night and I love merlot. No, I'm not drunkly. I went to a 50th birthday party tonight and had two lovely glasses of merlot. Then we went to a toy store. (I should never go to a toy store after two glasses of merlot, and after running eight miles. I bought some yellow teeth, a remote-control fart machine, two crazy pencils, and a present for my future niece who has yet to be conceived.) We went to an art gallery earlier that happens to have a grand piano and I played the Bach Prelude. Oh my, but it's sounding nice! Deborah (my piano teacher) has a grand (I can't remember the manufacturer. Forgive me.) that she wants to sell me for $8,800, or $100 a key. Hubster thinks that's too much. I told him it's a steal--we get the pedals, and the wood, and the wheels, and the bench for free! Lightning struck last nigh...

Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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