Picking Up the Pieces

March: Where the Plans Went Awry March is almost over, and my spreadsheet tells a pretty clear story: I missed most of my targets. I had planned to spend 65% of my time on Core work, split evenly between Foundations, Skills, and After You’ve Gone. In reality, Core ended up at 49% , and within that, Skills took over, with modulation and transposition getting most of my attention. Foundations and After You’ve Gone got the short shrift. In hindsight, the reasons aren’t all that complicated. First, I picked up “Danny Boy,” which wasn’t in the plan . It’s built on the Misty progression, so I told myself it could count toward Foundations, but most of the actual work was on modulation and transposition. So Skills ballooned, and everything else got squeezed out. And then I ended up dropping "Danny Boy" after all, so now that feels like it was wasted time (though it was good to work on the skills). Second, YAMS took more time than expected. It ended up at about a third of my practic...

It is so good to be back in "After You’ve Gone." I was a little afraid the three-week break would undo everything, but the first section is still there. I think that’s a testament to the effectiveness of the practice techniques I’ve picked up from Piano With Rebecca B and Molly Gebrian . This week I’m back in the solo section. The idea here is pretty straightforward: build the right-hand melody mostly from the notes already sitting in the left-hand chords. I really like this approach: fewer decisions, more actual playing. I made this short practice video yesterday, walking through where I am in the process. This phase of the AYG journey makes me really appreciate how Piano With Jonny structures things. It’s not that the steps are easy—they’re not—but they’re broken down in a way that makes them doable. First, block the right-hand chords while keeping a steady, blocked four-on-the-floor pattern in the left hand. Then start breaking up the right hand—one or two notes at a ti...

After writing down my new "required" and "optional" lists for the lead sheet courses , I realized I'd literally done everything on the list for Lead Sheets Lesson 6. And I thought I had at least two more weeks to go before I'd be ready to move on. So last night, instead of having a standard practice session on Lesson 6, I made this video, shared it with the PWJ group, and called it a day. I also decided to axe the Danny Boy Challenge . The music is so beautiful, but the intermediate version doesn't feel challenging enough (hence my desire to "make it my own project"), and the advanced version ... well, I don't want to say it's too hard, because I could sit down and play it from the sheet music right now. But the concepts—extensions, alterations, etc.—are beyond what I'm learning now, and it just took too much mental energy to both play it and understand it (much less transpose it). This time next year I'll have a better handle ...

I've been working through the Lead Sheet Level 4 courses for a while now, transposing to multiple keys, experimenting with different styles, doing some improvisation (or what might pass for it). But I keep getting stuck on one question: when is it okay to move on to the next lesson? I never feel like what I have is good enough, though I'm aware I tend to hold myself to absurdly high standards when it comes to piano. I just want someone, anyone, to say, "OK, Nina, you've done enough. Move on."  What Jonny Said  I asked Jonny about this at this week's Ask Jonny show. His response was completely valid: when to move on really depends on your goals. Which sent me back to think harder about what my goals actually are and how these courses relate to them.  My Relationship with These Courses  The lead sheet courses focus heavily on jazz ... but jazz really isn't my thing. So these lessons have been kind of like Brussels sprouts: I do them because I know they'r...

The PWJ recital was Thursday, and I rocked my YAMS performance! It wasn't perfect, but I barely paused and just kept moving forward. Jonny had very nice things to say—he always does, even if you made a ton of mistakes—but he also said I was playing at a professional level, and I will happily accept that compliment. The video was just posted (I may have checked for it dozens of times a day since the recital), and I finally watched my performance. It sounded better in my memory than in reality, which probably shouldn't be surprising. The piano sound quality wasn't great either, so that was a little disappointing. The performance is still good, though, and I’ll share it here if/when it becomes publicly available. For now, you just get a picture from it. (Not a video, just a recital photo) Why did I leave the cat toy in the background? Why didn't I wear something more flattering? Why do I have to look like such a middle-aged suburban mom? Why, why why? YAMS Fallow Period Fo...

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...