Picking Up the Pieces

My two-week vacation starts in a few days. For almost the entire time, I'll have zero access to a piano. Isn't that sad? I'm sad. This is one of those times where it would be more convenient to be a guitarist. I haven't made any conscious changes to my practice sessions, but something has changed. I'm not going as hard as I usually do. I haven't watched a new PWJ lesson since last week. I guess I don't want to start something that I won't be able to finish. I'm still practicing, of course, but only an hour or so each day instead of the usual 1.5 to 2.5 hours. Some days it's not quite even an hour. I haven't lost my passion for piano, so no worries about that. I think part of me is just distancing myself. Kind of like you cut back on caffeine for a few days before you have to go cold turkey. That being said, I'll provide an update here, and this will probably be my final update before I leave for vacation (unless, miraculously, I get a few...

Have you ever watched a really good ragtime pianist fly through a difficult-looking piece of music and wondered how their hands know what to do? It's like their hands are pre-programmed machines, and their brains aren't having to do any work at all; the hands just know where to go. How do they do that? Practice Doing Something Else Jonny May suggests forcing yourself to do other things while practicing. This is one way of literally training your hands to play the right notes, independent of your conscious mind. He suggests having a conversation with someone while you play, saying that he got a lot of this kind of practice while at Disney Land, since people were always interrupting him to ask directions. He also suggests talking to yourself, which I'm quite good at doing it (albeit not while playing the piano).  Another suggestion is to read a book while you play. I tried this a few times and could do it (sort of), and then I realized he meant to read a book aloud . I trie...

I've really been struggling with priorities in my piano life. I currently have about eight things going on: Bare Necessities Blues Learning Track Rondo alla Turca The Lead Sheets Course Ear Training (mostly for when I'm on road trips, which seems to be often these days) Scales, octaves, and other technique work Maintenance Pieces (Maple Leaf Rag, Chopin) Composition/Arranging Of all of those items, Bare Necessities and Blues have definitely gotten the brunt of my attention for the past couple of months. Rondo alla Turca, not so much. And everything else? Not much at all. Something's gotta give. About the Lead Sheets Course A week or two ago, I wrote about my struggle with the lead sheets course . I can see the value, but it doesn't feel relevant to what I want to focus on right now: learning, arranging, and composing in the blues/gospel/ragtime styles, with a bit of stride and boogie-woogie styles thrown in. And the songs I want to arrange are primarily hymns, not jazz ...

This video is far from perfect, far enough that I'm hesitant to post it here. But one thing Jonny teaches is that sometimes you have to practice not stopping, because when you're performing, you can't stop. You have to keep going. So this was an exercise in that. Of course, I still managed to stop a couple of times, and I think I even groan once or twice as is my wont. But I got through it. Any piano teacher who listens to this will think, "She needs to slow down." And yes, I know I do. My practice sessions have been a slow creep up the metronome, along with some section play-throughs where I recite my multiplication tables as a way to practice playing without thinking about what I'm playing. So I've done a lot of work there. Occasionally, I will have a fast-practice session, where I speed everything up and play through it at breakneck speed a couple of times. When I go back down to my practice-pace, it's like I can magically play it better at that tem...

When you're a pianist, it's good to have other pianists who can inspire you with their skills and style. For the past few months, Jonny May's video of Bare Necessities has been the one I've returned to again and again as I work on his wonderful arrangement. I want to be able to play that well, and I want to be able to play with that much enjoyment. I do enjoy playing, but I tend to adopt a "stern schoolmarm" face whenever I play, particularly if I'm having to concentrate hard on something (like Bare Necessities). I dream of one day being so laid-back with this piece that I can just look and feel happy and joyful as I play. Recently I discovered a new pianist: Matt Gerhard . He seems to be in Indiana, and I guess he plays for a church, though he's also put some music on Spotify. He's an organist and a pianist ... and oh, what a pianist! He play exactly the kind of soulful, exuberant gospel music that I want to play. I've been watching his video...

 I finished the 10-Lesson Blues Challenge this weekend! Yay! I am so happy. I was feeling so hopeless toward the end there, and then I was done! Yesterday, I started the next course of the Blues Track: Endings. Here are the first four endings I've learned. They'll take some practice, particularly that last one. But I think they sounded pretty good after just a half-hour or so of learning them!

Y'all, I think I'm going back to the basics. I want to work through the PWJ Beginner Foundations. Do I need to do this? No. At least I don't think so. But this little adventure will introduce a new, and wildly different, approach for me to practice my scales. Plus, since these are all PWJ lessons, I have a feeling I'll learn plenty of stuff. What About Scales? I'm pretty good at scales. I should be; I actually love to practice and play scales. Arpeggios, not so much ... but scales? I would practice them a half-hour a day if I had time. There's just something so satisfying about being able to fly up and down the keyboard the way I can with scales. (If you want to know about my usual scale practice, read/watch the videos in this post .) That being said, I've been strangely unmotivated to practice my scales lately. I'm not sure why; I think part of it is that (as usual) I have so many piano projects going on that something has to get neglected. And for the ...

I did it! I finished Lesson 10 of the Piano With Jonny 10-Lesson Blues Challenge! Of course there is still plenty of work to do. I need to spend some time mastering the material from the final lesson, plus I need to continue working on lines and integrating all of the other elements of the challenge into my playing. But I finished Lesson 10! According to my piano journal, I started the challenge exactly 4 months ago, on March 5. It's felt like a long journey, and, as recently as last week, I was feeling like I would never make progress. Bue I've made progress! Here is just a few minutes of playing this morning before work--it's nothing spectacular, but it represents so much progress in four months!

I'm feeling really down today. I don't know if it's related to piano, but it sure did come out as piano frustration this morning. I do think my melancholia has other sources. I'm frustrated about a lot of things that are going on in my life right now. I have a lot of anger, and a lot of bitterness. It's no secret that life hasn't turned out anything like I wanted it to, and it's all my own fault for making dumb decisions 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. It's hard for me to resist the temptation of asking "what if" and imagining that I could go back and do my life over again. Again, this is not piano-related, though of course I would have done piano differently. I wouldn't have worried so much about what other people think, and I wouldn't have put so much pressure on myself to be the biggest, most talented fish in my various musical puddles. Am I putting pressure on myself now? So much of this morning's frustration is related to my slow p...

A week or two ago, I went through Lesson 2 of the Lead Sheets course, which focuses on the popular "turnaround progression" (I explain it a little here, before getting rudely interrupted .) My Struggle with the Lead Sheets Course I am having trouble connecting this course to my piano goals of playing and writing/arranging blues, ragtime, and gospel. This course seems more focused on cocktail jazz piano, which I am not interested in. I do think it's good to learn the progressions, though, and learning to play (without thinking) in inversions is valuable time spent. Also, if I decide to start playing at nursing homes, it will be good to know how to play anything from a lead sheet. So, I am sticking with this course. It's been slow going because I have so much other stuff going on (in both life and piano). On Saturday I bought some colored sticky-tabs and started marking pages in my three giant real books so songs with different progressions are easy to find. (Part of my...

The month of June was disappointing, piano-wise. I did have some accomplishments, but practice time was often spotty and distracted. I didn't put the work into Rondo alla Turca that I'd planned, and I felt positively stalled in my blues progress. I struggled to connect the Lead Sheets course to my own piano goals. I mean, it's good to learn progressions, but I have no desire to be a tinkly cocktail jazz pianist. I was away from home more than usual, so my practice routine wasn't much of a routine. To make up for the lost piano time, I started doing ear-training exercises. That's been a surprisingly good use of my time, so I'm glad I started doing that. But I feel like I didn't make much progress toward goals. I did a pretty good job of keeping up with my percentages this month, though it all fell apart in the end. As you can see, I virtually ignored Chopin and Maple Leaf, and I spent far more time on Bare Necessities than I did Rondo alla Turca. I did make s...