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

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,...

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...

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...