Practice Plan vs Reality

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 don’t want to spend this entire final week before the recital drilling You Are My Sunshine and nothing else. I do need to practice it, of course, but I also want to rely on spaced repetition and interleaving to help make it solid. None of the research I’ve seen suggests that the best approach is to focus on the performance piece exclusively.

In fact, tonight I may do something very different tonight: I might not play You Are My Sunshine at all.

Instead, I’ll spend the evening with the things that have been sitting on the sidelines: After You’ve Gone, lead sheet work, and my “Maintenance A” pieces.

I suppose I could describe the last week as a useful “fallow period” for those pieces. But that would be giving myself too much credit. It wasn’t strategy. It was neglect. If the time away turns out to help them, great. But I’m not counting on it.

There’s also a small wrinkle this weekend: I’ll be in North Carolina, so there won’t be an endless Saturday practice session. I did find a church that will let me use one of their pianos for about an hour Saturday afternoon while my mom takes her nap, so I’ll at least get a little time at the keyboard.

In the meantime, You Are My Sunshine is sounding quite good. It still needs polishing (doesn’t it always?), but I’m confident it will be in good shape for the dry run and possibly in great shape by the PWJ recital.

Now I just need to bring the rest of the practice schedule back into balance.

Comments

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Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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