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How Not To Make a Progress Video

Tall Nick (the new piano) and I did not get along very well this weekend.

Several of my projects (Lead Sheets Lesson 4, After You've Gone, and St. Louis Blues) felt ready for a video I could share on PWJ. So I decided that on Saturday, in addition to practicing my maintenance pieces, I would make a few videos.

Ha. Haha.

I could write about my adventures with all three would-be videos, but I'll limit this blog post to After You've Gone.

Saturday morning, with the family gone and the house all to myself for many glorious hours, I sat down at Tall Nick, ready to record a good progress video of After You’ve Gone. It was a reasonable goal; I’d been working on the left-hand stride and right-hand melody for a couple of weeks. I had it by memory and felt comfortable with it. I was basically there.

Ha. Haha.

What followed was a familiar spiral: take after take, none of them good. I would get lost after the first measure, or I'd make it through the whole song and then crash and burn two measures before the end. Start. Stop. Restart. Delete. Restart again. More deleting. Some enthusiastic banging on my brand-new piano in frustration (not recommended). At one point, a book or two may have been launched across the room. I may have hurt my toe kicking a door. Tears may have been shed, and not just from the hurt toe.

Crucially, none of this produced a usable video.

By Sunday, it was obvious that trying harder was not the solution. Recording was failing because, apparently, After You've Gone still wasn't solid, despite all the focused work I'd already put into it.

So last night, while the rest of the world watched the Superbowl, I finally did the most productive thing I could: stopped trying to make a video.

Instead, I went back to the unglamorous work of breaking After You’ve Gone into small chunks (again, but smaller than before) and worked them slowly and deliberately. No camera, no pressure. Just repetition, pattern recognition, and letting my hands learn and repeat what they needed to do.

This morning, I was able to make the video after just a few false starts. The left hand wasn’t perfect, but it was steadier and more predictable. My brain wasn't trying to work so hard, possibly because my time was limited and I had to get to work soon.

I’m nowhere near the level of the great stride players who can blaze away without even looking at the keys. I may never get there. But I'm taking steps in the right direction.

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