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Jingle Bells Rag Weekend

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 chromatic in the right hand and the walk-up in the left hand. I'm also playing the melody completely on the off-beats for a couple of measures of the second part of the verse before returning to the notes as written. (This is where I speed up, though that speed-up wasn't intentional.)

I'm so proud of my little old self! It's a very basic improv/arrangement (started out as improv, and then I picked out the elements I wanted to keep, which is what you hear in the video), but it's mine. And I couldn't have done this without Piano With Jonny.

I'm so excited about making the final video for the entire piece. I'm going to do that either tonight or tomorrow morning. It's just about ready. The only parts that I still need to work on are (1) this new section, which I can play but not at the tempo of the rest of the piece, and (2) the right-hand octave-jumps toward the end. I've come a long way with those octave-jumps, but I still never quite know if they're going to turn out right until I play them. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised to play them perfectly at tempo, but it's always a surprise when I do. I need to know that they're going to be perfect.

I'm hoping to spend some time today (and over the next few days) thinking about my January piano goals and how I'm going to track them in my amazing practice tracker.  I wrecked my December percentage goals this weekend with all of my work on Jingle Bells Rag yesterday ... but it's OK. Rarely do I have a month where I don't stray from the plan, and it's usually when something like this happens--I get an idea for arranging something, and then everything goes off the rails. :)

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