Picking Up the Pieces

It's New Year's Eve! Happy New Year! I don't have any big plans for the evening, and I'm secretly hoping to spend a few hours at the piano before the year is out. To meet my percentage goals for December, I need to focus on ragtime and blues tonight. Yes! January Challenges Before I get into my January 2025 goals, I'll get the challenges out of the way. 1. Weekend travel. It's club volleyball season! My daughter is on a 15u club team this year, and we have two tournaments in January, three in February, and three in March! Add to that the fact that I'll be traveling to North Carolina to visit my mom once a month, and that's not a lot of weekend piano time. Oh, and there is the regular driving back and forth to practices twice a week. Can I make up for the lost time on non-travel, non-volleyball-practice days? We'll see! (By the way, I love club volleyball season. This is my daughter's third year playing club, and I look forward to it every year. T...

In mid-December of last year, I posted my first real piano post since 2019. I was feeling very tentative about coming back to piano. I've taken lessons over the years and have become a pretty good pianist ... but would I ever be able to play jazz? Could I ever learn to play the blues? Would I be stuck playing the same broken chords in the left hand for the rest of my life? My, how things have changed. When I posted, I had just joined Tonebase . A month later, I would join Piano With Jonny , and that's when my piano life would take off. Here are my piano hours from February (when I started tracking my hours using the PWJ log). July and August were not good months for piano. I spent part of July on vacation, and much of August in North Carolina when my dad was sick. September and October also took a hit, thanks to Hurricane Helene and ten days with no electricity. How I wished I had an acoustic piano during that time! Anyway, onward to my 2024 accomplishments ... 2024 Accomplish...

 I posted my video of Jingle Bells Rag on Christmas Eve. I messed up right toward the end (at a section I've practiced far more than any other section) but I was, overall, happy with the result. JBR is now a maintenance piece, and I'll be reviewing it weekly until next Christmas, when I work to get it back up to speed. Enjoy!

I found myself with an unexpectedly capacious amount of time for piano practice this weekend--and my wrist didn't hurt at all! I have no idea how long I practiced, but I estimate it was around seven hours over the two days. I tracked my time on Saturday (103 minutes on Liszt and 90 minutes on Jingle Bells Rag). But Sunday? I have no idea. I spent nearly all of Sunday's practice on ragtime. Technically, I was working on Jingle Bells Rag, but I was working more on improvisation and arranging. I came up with my own little arrangement for the first instance of the verse after the crossed-hands section. I'll share it here, even though it sounds terrible--not only is it plinky because I had the piano on a low volume due to family members sleeping, but I accidentally cut off the first second or two. But here it is: The "Nina elements" of this are (1) the off-beat notes in the melody, (2) the harmonized chromatics as filler, (3) the ending of the first part with the held ...

 Now that the doctor has cleared me to play piano as much as I want, I sat down last night to work some more on the bluesy Silent Night from a few days ago . I just turned on the camera and started to play. I ended up cutting out about half of the video (the first half, where I was still working things out), so here is the second half. I want to give it more of a boogie-woogie bass (broken octaves, walking up and down), but for now I'm just using the familiar old blues shuffle. You can tell as the video progresses that I'm loosening up more and more. By the end I'm practically dancing in my seat. It is so good to be able to play like this! And I didn't even delve into the many runs and riffs I've learned! There will be time for that later!

I went to the orthopedist today so he could diagnose whatever is wrong with my wrist. He is pretty sure it's a small ganglion cyst. The cyst is the shiny area right next to the boo-boo on my hand. (Gotta love eczema in winter.) What is a ganglion cyst? From Google AI: A ganglion cyst is a fluid-filled bump that usually appears on the wrist or near a joint or tendon sheath. Ganglion cysts are round, small, and filled with a jelly-like fluid. They can feel firm or spongy, and can be translucent. They most often appear on the back of the wrist, but can also occur on the front of the wrist, base of a finger, ankle, or foot. Most ganglion cysts are painless and don't cause other symptoms. However, if a cyst presses on a nerve, it can cause tingling or muscle weakness. The cause is unknown, but they are thought to be caused by repetitive microtrauma. They are more common in younger people and women, and are often found in people who play sports or other activities that involve repeat...

Once upon a time, almost a year ago, I wrote about feeling like I was locked in a "gray little room," worlds away from feeling freedom at the piano. I'd had many years of lessons and could play, but I was tied to the sheet music. Or if I was improvising, I would fall into the same old pattern in the left hand and could hardly advance beyond the actual tune in the right hand. I felt trapped, and I'd felt trapped for nearly all of my piano life. I wanted to play jazz. I wanted to play blues. I wanted to be able to "ragtimify" any song. I could hear the arrangements in my head, but I didn't know how to play them. Last night, I started picking through "Silent Night" with a blues shuffle in the bass. And ... I improvised. I riffed. I rocked. I had so much fun. I hated having to go to work today because all I wanted to do was stay home and play this bluesy, boogie-style Silent Night. I feel like I am walking on air. That rusty lock has broken, and ...

Yesterday was the Piano With Jonny annual student awards, and I won a ragtime performance award! It was quite an honor because there are a lot of good pianists, including ragtime pianists, in the PWJ community. Most of the awardees had been in PWJ for multiple years, so I felt particularly honored as a first-year student. Here is the clip where they announced the award! This honor has inspired me to think about my future long-term goals. Barring further issues with my wrist (and elbow), I think I have big plans for 2025. Ragtime First, I want to learn three new Scott Joplin rags: Pineapple Rag, Elite Syncopations, and The Ragtime Dance. I want to learn them in that order--in other words, from the easiest to the most difficult. The plan is to average four months per piece, with the hope that Pineapple Rag will take a little less than that so I have more time for the others. These will be more challenging than my pieces from 2024 (Maple Leaf Rag, Solace, and The Entertainer). Not only a...

I started running again about three weeks ago. I used to run a lot, but I haven't run regularly in years. Every time I start to increase my distance, I end up with an injury. Every time--no matter how careful I am. Still, I'm trying again. I found a doable Couch-to-5K program online and started with an easy run-1-minute-walk-1-minute workout. Now I'm up to running 5 minutes and walking three minutes. For my next run (tomorrow night), I'll run 5 minutes and walk two minutes, four times. My latest run: Run 5 min, walk 3 min, X 4 (plus warmup and cooldown) It feels so good to feel like an athlete again. I'm definitely not an athlete, but I feel like one when I'm running. It feels good to break a sweat and to get short of breath and then recover and then run again. Piano isn't a sport, but the feelings are similar. It feels good to know I'm in shape, pianistically. I can't tell you the amazing feeling of looking at a difficult passage in Liszt, and then ...

I had wrist pain this weekend, so I wasn't able to move forward on some of my weekend goals . I still got some good practice in. I have dorsal wrist impingement , according to Dr. Google. Technique My plan was to work on Czerny Ex. 2. It's an exercise primarily for the left hand, and it was my left wrist that was hurting, so I started Ex. 4 instead. (I wasn't crazy about Ex. 3.) I learned it pretty easily and will work on getting it up to speed this week, and I'll return to Ex. 2 when my wrist pain is gone. Liszt I am through most of the C Major section in Liszt! It's not as difficult as the B Major section (though it sounds like it is). It's still not easy, so I'll work on it a bit more before moving on to what's next. Jingle Bells Rag The goal was to increase the tempo to 100. I spent quite a bit of time on the right hand since my left hand was hurting. Last night I finally brought the left hand in. I'm very close to having it hands-together at 100...

We are a week into December, and I haven't practiced nearly as much this month as I did in November. I should be able to get some good practice in this weekend. My daughter has volleyball stuff both Saturday and Sunday, so I'll be out of the house a bit to get her to and from. I'm also planning to work out on Sunday afternoon. Other than that, I'll be home--washing sheets and towels, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, and practicing the piano. Oh, and I need to go Christmas shopping. I keep forgetting. Anyway, onward to the piano goals! Technique I have the Czerny Exercise 1 at a good clip. I've started learning Exercise 2, which is even more delightful than Exercise 1. While Ex. 1 focuses mainly on the right hand, Ex. 2 is very left-hand heavy. I've played through the first half (luckily, it's an easy sight-read), and my goal for this weekend is to simply learn the second half and become comfortable playing the whole exercise before I start upping the tempo...

I finally have some progress videos to share! There were all one-off videos because I had no time to re-record things until they were perfect. These are progress videos anyway, so you'll hear a few unplanned pauses, wrong notes, and tempo inconsistencies. But it's sounding like music! And that is my current low bar for this piece! I am focusing really hard on bringing out the melody notes throughout. That is a harder task than you would think, but I'm getting there. Here is the first section, which introduces the theme: I don't have a video of the second section because I accidentally deleted it. But below is the first cadenza, which follows the missing second section. This seemed to take forever to learn, but now that I have it, it feels very natural under my fingers. I'm still playing it slowly and deliberately; speed and expression will come, but not just yet. Here is the B-major section that follows the cadenza. It includes the gorgeous modulation to C major. It...

Today when I opened my practice journal on PWJ , I saw that I've put 484 hours of practice in since joining PWJ on January 30. My home for 484 hours (so far) this year. Wow. Four hundred and eighty-four hours. God willing, I should hit the 500-hour mark in another ten or twelve days. Five hundred hours of practice! At that rate, I'll hit 10,000 hours in just 20 years! 10,000 Hours? Honestly, I wonder if I've put 10,000 hours of practice in by this point in my life. I've never tracked my practice time until this year, so I have no way of knowing. I have had some years where I've practiced this much (and more), but then there have been years of almost no practice. (Five minutes later ...) So, I went into Excel just now and estimated my hours of practice every year since I started playing in 1974. My very first practice session, at age 4, was after church one Sunday evening. I worked and worked and worked at playing "Just As I Am." I have no idea how long it ...