Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

I started working on Section A of "Solace" last night, and I worked on it a little more this morning. It's not fully memorized yet (as you can tell from the video), but I'm close. Last night I learned the first page and the first few bars of the second (which is just repetition from the first), and this morning I worked on the ending/cadence part. This has long been one of my favorite Scott Joplin pieces. It's so different from most of his other ragtime music: slow, melancholy, thoughtful. And it gives me the weirdest sense of nostalgia--not for the early 1900s, but for ... I can't even explain it. It just fills me with longing for something I can't name. Challenges This isn't a difficult piece to play. Harmonically, it's pretty simple--triads, dominant sevenths, a minor seventh, and a few diminished sevenths. The cadences are pretty basic. All of that makes it easier to memorize. There are a couple of challenges, though. The fingering, for one, is...

As I mentioned yesterday, Bare Necessities is technically in maintenance mode. I'm no longer learning the notes, and I can play through it well enough, and at a good enough tempo, that it will have that "wow" factor for any audience. However . It's not perfect. Certain parts are sloppy. There are still a few parts that I flub more often than not. They're minor, and it's not the end of the world when I miss the notes, but the overall effect is less than dazzling ... and I want my performance of this piece to be knock-your-socks-off dazzling . So there is work to do. Backing Up, Slowing Down Although I can play the entire piece at between 200 and 230, I've slowed it back down to the 160-170 range. My focus for now is repetition, repetition, repetition. And not just any repetition. This is perfection repetition: playing it perfectly, with no missed notes and no pauses, over and over and over again at manageable speeds. Once I've played it perfectly at le...

Thanks to my new schedule, I'm not able to make random recordings like I could earlier this year. I hate that because it really helps me to record and listen to myself. So instead of playing something for you, I'll write an update on where I am, now that I am a couple of days back into my practice routine. Ridiculously, I have nine projects going on. I'll list/write about them in order of how much time I'm spending on them, from most to least. Blues I really have three blues sub-projects: blues endings, reviewing the 10-Lesson Challenge material, and Amazing Grace in the slow blues gospel style. I've begun memorizing the endings so that they're easier to play, and I'm practicing playing them after improvising for several rounds of the 12-bar blues using what I've learned in the 10-Lesson Challenge. That seems to work pretty well. I started Amazing Grace after my last visit to my dad, and I've memorized most of it as well, so I expect to have it...

I mentioned yesterday that life has been hard lately. It is due to a number of things. One of the results, or one of the causes, maybe, is that I have been so angry lately. Furious. Bitter. I honestly feel like I hate everyone. I don't, but there are times when I just want to start screaming, or beating my head against the wall, or throwing plates at the wall. There are a few things that help. Exercise is one, so I've made an effort to hit the gym most days since I got home from North Carolina. And, of course, there is piano. Whether I'm just moodling (musical doodling) on a chord progression or drilling a tricky passage, piano helps me to take my focus off my anger. If I can get some piano time and some exercise time into a single day, then I'll likely make it to the next day without feeling like my head will explode. But then there is another thing that makes me really angry: when I'm playing piano and someone in the family yells at me to "turn it down" ...

Life has been really hard lately. I'm not going to go into details here ... it's just been really hard. Following our 10-day vacation, I ended up having to be away from home for another week due to a family emergency. I got back last Thursday, worked from home on Friday because I was still a wreck, and sort-of recovered over the weekend. I'm still so tired--exhausted, really--and just when I think I can take a breath, something else happens to amp up the stress and anxiety levels. It also hasn't been a great month for piano. I got back from vacation on July 30, ready for a productive August, but I had to leave home after several jet-lagged recovery days. Oh, and a friend of mine visited for a week, which was great, but that also meant I didn't practice much. All in all, it's been nearly a month since I've had a good, focused piano practice. I was able to practice a little on Friday, but I found myself at a loss. I was in kind of an "Okay, now where was ...

This weekend, I started working on "Solace" by Scott Joplin. It's subtitled "A Mexican Serenade," and it's a slow, meditative, beautiful piece of music. The section half (C and D sections) was featured in the movie "The Sting," so it's familiar to a lot of people. I learned the popular C and D sections years ago, probably at about the same time I first learned "Maple Leaf Rag." As with "Maple Leaf," I only learned part of it, and now I have the dual goal of (1) memorizing the part I've already learned and (2) learning the new-to-me A and B sections. This weekend, I managed to memorize the C section and most of the D section. I also started writing in the fingering for the A section ... though the B section looks a little harder, so I may begin with that one instead. Anyway, here is my first effort at playing the C section by memory. I kept the music up, just in case I needed it. Enjoy!

After nearly two weeks away from home, my piano, and this blog, I'm back! I'm rested and revived and ready to start practicing again! Also, as of yesterday, we have paid off my digital piano! So life is good. I set up my spreadsheet of August goals, and, once again, I have too many irons in the fire. Too many projects. I have an ultimate goal of working on fewer things per month, but I'm not sure how to get there. Here are the EIGHT main things I'm focusing on for August: The Goals 1. Technique. 5% of practice time. Mostly this is warm-up stuff, but I'm always working on improving my technique. This category covers scales, arpeggios, inversions, and any Hanon exercises. 2.  CISE. 10% of practice time. This is another catch-all category. CISE stands for C omposition, I mprovisation, S ight-Reading, E ar-Training. It can include anything from "moodling" to playing hymns to improvising on chord progressions or lead sheets, to doing ear-training exercises in ...