Skip to main content

Bare Necessities Update

Friends, I feel like I'm finally starting to make progress on Bare Necessities, now that I'm practicing it consistently. I'm still not giving it as much time as I'd like (averaging only 20-30 minutes a day), but consistency is the main goal.

Well, I wasn't super-consistent last week because I was piano-less for three days. But other than that ...

Section A: Stride

Anyway, I have two videos to share today. The first is of the stride section, which I'd gotten up to a good tempo for several days. I noticed yesterday that it was starting to sound sloppy at that tempo, which was a clear sign that I was playing it faster than I was ready for ... and so I slowed it down.

It's not perfect in this video (I miss a couple of notes and have a couple of memory lapses), but I'm very happy with my progress on this section.

Section B: Ragtime

This video is not nearly as much fun to listen to, at least not yet. In it, I'm playing the ragtime section with the metronome on 70--more than 2x slower than the goal tempo! I can play the first 2/3 of the piece at a faster tempo, but again, it gets sloppy. And the final 1/3 is what I just learned this weekend, so I'm nowhere near ready to speed it up. I found that I could play through the whole thing at 70, so that's what I've done in this video.

(At about the 1:58 mark, I discover an ant crawling on the piano. Thankfully, the pest control people are coming tomorrow.)

Again, it isn't perfect, but I think you can at least tell what song it is, and that's progress!

Labels:

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