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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!

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