A Whirlwind Piano Week

It has been a busy week for piano, which is kind of wild, since I have an injured left wrist and haven’t had access to my piano since last Friday.

But some exciting things have happened nonetheless, so I’ll share them here.

One Thousand Hours!

I hit the 1,000-hour mark in my PWJ practice journal this weekend! I started keeping the journal the day I joined PWJ, January 31, 2024. Funny enough, that day feels like it should be an observed holiday in my mind. Almost like a birthday. Definitely a rebirth day.

Of course, I have a chart showing which pieces and projects received what degree of attention over the past two years. In this chart, I left out anything that got less than six hours, mainly to keep it somewhat clean.

It’s interesting that so much of my time went toward learning written pieces: Liszt, Pineapple Rag, Bare Necessities, and others. I expect very little of my time to go toward written pieces this year, as I’m morphing from an interpreter/performer identity into an arranger and musical explorer. Speaking of arranging and exploring…

YAMS Feedback!

I finally bit the bullet and submitted a very rough You Are My Sunshine video to the PWJ page, asking for kind but constructive criticism. I didn’t get much at first, but on Saturday, Jonny May himself listened and gave me some very pointed and helpful feedback. He was extremely enthusiastic about the arrangement, which sent my motivation into the stratosphere. Since then, I’ve been playing with ideas based on his input and rewatching some of the courses he recommended.

Transposing Focus

With my left hand out of commission thanks to a ganglion cyst, and with only a Yamaha YPT-400 to play, I’ve been spending a lot of my piano time lately on transposing melodies. Or, more specifically, on thinking of notes and chords as numbers or scale degrees. Jonny teaches this approach in the PWJ Transposing Lead Sheets course.

I’ve never thought about music this way before, and the idea is blowing my mind. I want to write more about this later. It really is a paradigm shift for me.

Reading and Listening

I’m currently reading The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten, which has been interesting. It’s a little odd in places, but it’s offering some good food for thought, particularly as I shift toward a more explorative approach to music. I’m also nearly finished listening to Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia.

Finally, I’ve been listening to a lot of music, mostly songs listed in the lead sheet course that follow similar chord progressions. Between this listening and my transposing work, I really think my ear has begun to develop more.

So, that may not be a “whirlwind” week for most people, but it has been for me.

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Picking Up the Pieces

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