Picking Up the Pieces

Are y'all tired of reading about my You Are My Sunshine progress yet? No? Excellent. I will continue. This week is recital week. Yesterday was my "dry run" recital with the Piano with Rebecca B group. Tomorrow is the PWJ Student Recital. PwRB Performance Report I crashed and burned. Maybe that's an overstatement. At the time it felt like crashing and burning. Perhaps more accurately, I stumbled, recovered, stumbled again, and kept moving forward—which, really, counts as a kind of success. The tempo held together, more or less. (Though I'm scared to watch the video Rebecca kindly posted after the recital.) The piece never fully unraveled. But the mistakes were persistent—and oddly placed, showing up in spots that usually sound fine in practice. The finale, in particular, went rogue. I landed solidly on a completely wrong chord at one point, and at the very end I forgot to finish on the high octave for the final downward gliss. So I ended in the middle of the keyboa...

My piano schedule has been a little unbalanced lately. Most of my time has been going into You Are My Sunshine, getting it ready for my Tuesday recital dry-run and the PWJ recital on Thursday. That part makes sense. Deadlines have a way of focusing the mind. Then I added something that was not part of the original plan: the Danny Boy Challenge on Piano With Jonny. I hadn’t intended to do it. But the arrangement is so beautiful that I caved. It also turned out to be a great piece for working on my still-developing transposition skills. Moving it through different keys forces me to think less in terms of letter names and more in terms of functions and shapes. It's been hard, slow work, but I can tell I'm making progress. So that’s all been good. But every time something new gets added, something else tends to get squeezed out. In this case, the neglected projects are After You’ve Gone, the Lead Sheets with Seventh Chords course, and my maintenance pieces. That needs to change. I ...

Sometimes I hate having a digital piano. I miss the simplicity of an acoustic: if something sounds bad, it’s either because the piano is out of tune or I am. With a digital piano, there’s a whole host of settings that could be causing the problem. Balance Weirdness in "You Are My Sunshine" I made my "You Are My Sunshine" run-through video earlier this week. In my head, the balance of bass and treble sounded fine. At the piano, it felt fine. But in the video, the bass sounded booming and muddy, while the melody got lost in the reverberation. Despite my efforts to bring out the right hand and keep the stride bass light, the low notes seemed to swallow everything. I was so frustrated. And then Rebecca and others commented on the same problem when I shared the video on the Piano With Rebecca B platform. So I knew it wasn’t just me. Discovering the Problem Yesterday morning I started digging into the sound more seriously. And suddenly I remembered something I had compl...

This morning, a few minutes before leaving for work, I sat down at the piano and played You Are My Sunshine start to finish without stopping (other than for a few minor flubs). It’s not perfect, but overall it sounds pretty solid. At this point the work is mostly polishing. So now I’m going to listen back to the recording and jot down my observations as I prepare for recital week. 0:21 – Sounds pretty good so far. I should do more metronome work with the click on the off-beat. That will help tighten the rhythm. 0:34 – Those slides sound nice! I really love this section. 0:55 – Interlude 1 sounds good. 1:07 – The first ragtime section sounds muddy. I need to work on articulation and maybe ease up on the pedal. 1:30 – The stride section is sounding better but still needs work. 1:45 – The C9 in Interlude 2 sounds better than I expected. But I should vary the rhythm when switching back to the F6—right now it feels a bit repetitive. 2:00 – The first crossed-hands section feels ponderous...

Y'all, You Are My Sunshine (YAMS) is getting real. Despite being sidelined for a few days by the whiny ganglion cyst in my left wrist, I think I can have YAMS ready for the Piano With Rebecca B dry-run recital on March 17 and the PWJ Student Recital on March 19. All of the sections sound pretty good at play-through, and I'm mostly just tweaking things here and there at this point. (By tweaking, I mean technically; I'm no longer in composing/arranging mode.) I did make one final big decision this morning on the solo section. I'd been playing it in the highest octave available on the piano for a kind of “toy piano” effect. It was fun, but I thought it sounded much better an octave down. At the same time, the solo follows the crossed-hands section where the melody is in the deep bass, so the “toy piano” effect provided both balance and a kind of humorous development. But high-frequency hearing loss, paired with the fact that I can't wear my hearing aid when I play the ...

This month’s Piano With Jonny challenge is the first verse of Danny Boy. The assignment itself is simple enough: play the melody with the basic chords. But because I'm both a glutton for punishment and a music theory nerd, I've made this something much larger. The version in this video is in the original key of C. I’m in Lesson 2 of the challenge (root-position chords + one-note melody) and am pretty much playing it as I should, with a few slides added. I play slides all the time in blues, but I suspect I got the idea here from spending the past few days listening almost obsessively to Bill Evans's recording of Danny Boy. I love the spacious, reflective sound to his version, so I definitely think I'm channeling him here (minus the complex chords). So I hope you'll hear that when you listen. What you won't hear, though, is the humming busy-ness inside my brain as I play! There's a whole lot happening behind the scenes. Behind the Scenes Right now several cou...

I have completed Lesson 4 ("Hands Together") of the PWJ "After You've Gone" course! Well, not exactly. I completed the first phase, which was being able to get it hands together, no matter how slow. I'm still at a relatively slow tempo, though it's picked up quite a bit in the past week. I was finally able to post this progress video on Feb. 28 (my goal was to have something to share by the end of the month, so goal achieved!). The next goals for this piece: Slowly increase the tempo to the 100-120 range. Practice playing a solo Possibly work out an intro and outro Lesson 5 is on soloing. I've already watched it, and it's pretty basic: just use the four notes in whatever chord your left hand happens to be playing. So, if the left hand is on F6, then just play something that only uses F, A, C, and D. Pretty easy. I think the hardest part will be coordinating--switching to the next chord solo in the right hand, and remembering the order of the p...