Skip to main content

Stats for December and 2024

December was a good month for practicing! Even though I lost some time with traveling and working out in the evenings, I still managed to get 54.9 hours in. I also was within range for all of my percentage goals! I did change the goals toward the end of the month. Both classical and ragtime review were at 10%, and I changed them to 8% and 12%, respectively, because I felt that ragtime needed more attention.

Jingle Bells Rag was over range for most of the month as I worked to have it ready in time for Christmas. Once I posted the video to Facebook on Dec. 24, I focused on other projects, though I did revisit it a couple of times as a new maintenance piece.

The Stats

Here are the stats:

(The "# of wins" category refers to which pieces got the most practice time each day.)

Here is a chart showing time allotted to my main projects and maintenance categories:

I also graduated from one piece this month (Jingle Bells Rag).

Some 2024 Stats

I wrote a little about my 2024 practices here, but below are a few additional stats for the year, in a nutshell. Some of them are from the PWJ site. Note that I didn't start logging my practices until I joined PWJ on January 31, 2024, so this doesn't include any January practices. (I wasn't playing much in January anyway.)

Total Practice Time: 533 hours, 51 minutes

Total Days Practiced: 297

Longest Streak: 159 days

Hours Practiced for Individual Pieces:

  • Bare Necessities: 81.1
  • Chopin F Minor Nocturne: 59.3
  • Blues Track Courses: 86.0
  • Maple Leaf Rag: 40.2
  • PWJ Sevenths Courses: 22.0
  • Mozart, Rondo alla Turca: 39.0
  • Technique: 36.9
  • Misty Challenge: 14.0
  • Solace: 22.6
  • Jingle Bells Rag: 40.4
  • Liszt, Liebestraume: 31.5
  • Amazing Grace: 6.3*
  • The Entertainer: 9.0

*I didn't track my Amazing Grace practice at first because I started learning it while at my parents' house on the weekends. It was just a "side thing" that I grouped into a category I called "Lagniappe." Also included in Lagniappe were my work on The Old Rugged Cross, PWJ ear training courses, random sight-reading, songwriting, and a couple of PWJ pop courses. My records are showing about 25 hours to lagniappe, but I'm thinking it's more like 40 since I didn't start tracking it until this summer.

I've already written about my 2025 goals, so after this post I will get back to posting my progress in my various projects. Stay tuned!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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,...

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...