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Back At It!

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 Composition, Improvisation, Sight-Reading, Ear-Training. It can include anything from "moodling" to playing hymns to improvising on chord progressions or lead sheets, to doing ear-training exercises in the car.

3. Scott Joplin, Solace. 20% of practice time. I learned the second half of this piece years ago. My goals for August/September are to (1) memorize the section I already know, and (2) learn and memorize the section I don't already know. I'm guessing this will be a 2- to 3-month project: a few weeks to memorize the second section, and then another four to six weeks to learn and memorize the first section. From there, I'll need to spend time polishing it.

4. Bare Necessities. 20% of practice time. I'm so close with this one. Really, the only hurdle I have left is to get everything up to tempo. It's fine as is, in that I could perform it anywhere and have it sound good ... but I want to get those last few sections at a good clip. I will work on this in August, but my days of focusing on BN to the neglect of other pieces are over.

5. Blues. 20% of practice time. When I left for vacation, I'd started to dabble with the various endings in the Blues Endings course ... but I hadn't worked very hard on them because I knew I was going to be gone for two weeks, and I also knew that I didn't have enough time to "cement" anything before I left. So I will likely start over with this, and I also want to spend a good portion of every single day just working on all of the techniques I learned in the Blues Challenge until they all feel completely natural.

Maintenance Pieces. I have three maintenance pieces now:

  • 6. Rondo alla Turca. 5% of practice time. I haven't officially graduated from this one yet because I haven't made the final video. However, I'm very close, and I expect to make that video in the next few days. So, for most of August, it will be a maintenance piece.
  • 7. Maple Leaf Rag. 5% of practice time. I gave an impromptu performance of the A and B sections while in Europe(!) and have posted that at the end of this blog entry. It's sounding quite good, but I need to slow things down a bit and weed out some of the sloppiness that has worked its way in. (Piano playing is a lot like gardening in that way ... if you're not careful, the weeds of sloppiness and failed memory will always pop up.)
  • 8. Chopin, Nocturne in F minor: 15% of practice time. I've given this one a bigger time allotment because of the masterclass coming up in September. I don't know that I'll need that much practice time, but I do want to put enough work into this that I can play it through, and well, even if my mind goes completely blank at the masterclass.

Those are my goals for the month!

And now, for my impromptu performance at the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich!

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