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Weekend Goals

It's time to think about my weekend piano goals! This should be a rare weekend where I can practice as much as I want to, so I'm excited about getting started.

SCALES: I've been working on A-flat major and F minor all week, and they're sounding pretty good. I'll move on to E-flat major and C minor next week. These are both easy scales for me, so I might make my tempo goals a little higher, just to see what I can do!

LEAD SHEETS: The lead sheet course has been helpful, but it's also been a lot of review. I've known about the Cycle of Fifths and Turnaround (Prison) progressions forever, so even though I'm applying them to new songs and using various inversions and working in multiple keys, the material itself isn't new. So I think I'm going to take some time to watch Lesson 3, which is on the extended turnaround progression. It may be another familiar progression ... but my goal, by the end of the weekend, is to be able to play/improvise songs from the fake/real books that use those progressions. Let's put a number to that and say I'll make a video of one song per progression to share here next week.

BLUES: I didn't work on blues as much this week as I'd hoped. I can play most (but not all) of the runs from Lesson 9, so I want to get those wrapped up this weekend so I can start Lesson 10 next week.

BARE NECESSITIES: At this point, it's just a matter of building up my speed and increasing automaticity. I may try Jonny's suggestion of reading aloud while playing. I know I'll do quite a bit of fast-twitch drilling. I'm so excited about this piece! I'm so close!

RONDO ALLA TURCA: This one sounds fine--good enough that I could play it for people and they would enjoy it. I want to take it to the next level, though--really get the scale passages smooth and the broken octaves and coda sections clean. I also want to think more about dynamics. I've been playing it with dynamics, but I haven't consciously planned what I want to do with them. So I need to think about that.

MAINTENANCE PIECES: Continue doing what I've been doing, and play through these pieces a few times over the weekend, stopping as needed to work on anything that's gotten sloppy.

And that's it! Hoping to share more videos this weekend!

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