May Practice Report

Here are my practice stats for May 2024:

I put 64.9 hours of practice into my "assigned" (by me) pieces, plus 5 hours into "free" work (mostly working on gospel stuff while in North Carolina), for a total of 69.9 hours of practice this month. That the most I've practiced since I came back to piano a few months ago!

(Chart does not include the gospel ("free") work that I did.)

The piece that got the most work in May was Bare Necessities (18.9 hours), followed by Rondo alla Turca (15.6 hours) and the Blues Challenge (12.5 hours).

This was my first month to set percentage goals. I met some of them, but I fell woefully short on the Rondo and 7ths practice.

I've adjusted my goals for June to allow more time (20%) for Blues, and less (25%) for each of my main pieces. I'm also going to bump my Lead Sheets goal up to 15% because I have a feeling this course will be more interesting and challenging to me than the Diminished/Half-Diminished Sevenths course was. I'll also combine Chopin and Maple Leaf into a "Maintenance" category with a goal of 10%, and I'll leave Hanon/Scales at 5%.

I'm happy with my progress in May. I can now play through Bare Necessities and Rondo alla Turca, and I made a final/performance video of the Chopin. I still need to make a Maple Leaf Rag video. And I made it through Blues Lesson 8 (the goal) and completed the Seventh Chords Foundations courses! So I feel like I'm in a very good place.

Comments

Rethinking Bare Necessities

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,

March Goals Recap/Looking Ahead to April

It's April 1, and time to revisit the goals I set for last month. I practiced a total of 50.45 hours in March, averaging 1.62 hours (or just over an hour and a half) per day. Realistically, I practice about 45 minutes to an hour a day on weekdays, and I usually get at least one longer practice (or multiple shorter practices) in on one or both days of the weekend to bring the average up. CLASSICAL GOALS Chopin, F Minor Nocturne March Goal: Have entire piece by memory and performance-ready. I have about 90% of the piece by memory, but I still have some work to do before it's performance-ready. The only two sections that I don't quite have are "The Agitation" and the "stretto" section with the seventh chords. I'll work on both this week and will have them both memorized before the weekend. April Goal: Finish memorizing, and polish, polish, polish! My focus now is really on phrasing and dynamics. I have the notes down, even in the difficult passages. Fro

Maple Leaf Rag Breakthrough

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

Picking Up the Pieces

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