Skip to main content

Winding Down

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 minutes to make some piano videos).

Bare Necessities

I've been going at this one really hard. I can play the whole thing at 200 bpm, which is (technically) the "slow" tempo for the stride section. However, I feel like I've hit a wall. I've started missing notes that I never missed before. I'm having to slow down because my hands are going haywire. I've experienced this before (though not since my 30s when I was studying with Deborah, and before that, not since college), and I know what it is: I need a break. I've put in a ton of work and I've made great progress, but my brain is tired. So it's good that I'll be getting a break.

Mozart

If I were studying full-time with a piano teacher, he or she would have "graduated" me from this one by now. It sounds fine. It sounds good, even. Really good. I just don't know what to do with it now. I have it at my goal tempo (120-125 bpm). I have the dynamics worked out. The section with all the sixteenth notes is acceptably even. Even the broken-octaves-and-coda section sounds "good enough." So my goal to graduate by the time I leave for vacation has been met. (So why doesn't it feel that way?)

Blues

I've done Lessons 1 and 2 of the Blues Endings course, and these endings are challenging! I haven't moved on to Lesson 3 since I know I'll be gone for two weeks. I've also been improvising over the shuffle nearly every day, practicing all the things I've learned so far -- the blues scale exercises, slides, turns, rolls, licks, runs, tremolos, etc. I don't have the same enthusiasm that I had before, which is troubling. Learning to play the blues well is a long journey, and I think I'm just ready for some rest.

Lead Sheets

I dropped the lead sheets course, but I'm still working on the progressions every morning as part of my warm-up routine. This wasn't planned; it's just something I'm doing. And I'm getting better at it! The only part of the Circle of Fifths progression that throws me is the move from IV major 7th to vii half-diminished to III dominant seventh. And this morning, I found my hands getting through those naturally in several different keys before I hit the usual wall. So there is improvement!

Maintenance Pieces

MLR and Chopin both sound fine. Oddly (or perhaps not oddly), all my work on Bare Necessities seems to have improved my playing of MLR.

Oh, and I've hit a milestone!

I noticed this morning that I've hit 300 hours of piano practice since February 1! No wonder I'm tired! 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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,
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more