Picking Up the Pieces

Well… I had a major piano development last weekend and somehow didn’t write about it. I PLAYED BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE (BWV 846) IN ALL 12 KEYS! Folks, I transposed this baby. No sheet music, no written progressions, no lead sheet. Just what’s been settling into my brain over the past couple of weeks. I’d been experimenting with transposing it here and there, but the switch flipped sometime Saturday evening. I played it from memory in C, then transposed to G. Then F. Then B♭. Then E♭. Those went pretty smoothly, since I've tried transposing to those keys before. But then, at some point, I thought, “What about A♭?” So I tried it ... and it wasn't hard. So I moved on to D♭. Then G♭ (not exactly a friendly key). Still worked. Then B (even less friendly). A few stumbles, but I made it through. Then E, A, and D ... and they felt easy. Then G, then C ... full circle! I was in a serious flow state. Part of it was the prelude itself—I could listen to it all day—but a bigger part was...

In my journey through the Learn New Repertoire Faster Challenge at Piano with Rebecca B , I’ve reached Day 9 of Jonny May’s stride arrangement of Ode to Joy . Each day of the challenge has a particular topic, and today’s topic was interval timers, so I integrated that into my work on Batches 1 and 3 today. Interval Timers There is a wealth of options (apps) for anyone wanting to use an interval timer, but I just use the timer in my phone clock. Which I guess is another app. Anyway, sometimes I use the timer for interleaving (spending just a few minutes on one section before switching), and other times it’s just to avoid losing track of time. I also track how many minutes I spend on each piece/project, so the timer is essential. Left Hand Work and Interleaving Today I isolated the left hand in both batches. I’ve been practicing mostly hands together, but this is stride. The left hand has to be smooth and steady, with little room for error. It needs to feel automatic at any tempo. I use...

It's Day 8 of the Learn Repertoire Faster Challenge in the Piano with Rebecca B community, and I'm still plugging away at Jonny May's stride arrangement of Ode to Joy . Day 8 Today's assignment focuses on two batches: Batch 1 (revisit; continue to solidify) Batch 3 (analyze, figure out the fingering, start learning) Although I had limited time this morning, I was able to spend about 15 minutes on Batch 1 and about a half hour on Batch 3. Batch 1: Transition Heck I played through the three passages slowly. They’re mostly solid, except for the transitions, of which there are four: Intro → A A → A' A' → B A'' → solo A I walk through these in the video, so just a few notes here: It really sucks when you realize you read the note values wrong the first time and have to relearn a measure. Alas, better late than never. Retroactive interference is real. Even though I worked on all four transitions today, I need to practice them separately (not all in the sam...

It's Day 7 of the Learn New Repertoire Faster Challenge in the Piano with Rebecca B community ! I'm working on Jonny May's stride arrangement of Ode to Joy . Day 7 Assignments Our assignments for today included: Revisit Batch 1 to see how it's doing Listen to other recordings and note what works (and what doesn't) for me Review  deliberate practice concepts and apply them to Batch 2 Revisiting Batch 1 Batch 1 is holding up! I played through it a couple of times with no real issues. Some measures are more solid than others, and I can feel the urge to speed up creeping in. Tomorrow I'll return to it (along with starting Batch 3) and will start using the metronome to avoid the speed-up-where-it's-easy, slow-down-where-it's-hard pattern. Listening to Other Recordings I found three YouTube performances (besides Jonny's). More detailed thoughts are in the video, but here are my key takeaways: If I don't deliberately bring out the melody in the A sec...

I'm continuing with Jonny May’s stride arrangement of Ode to Joy as part of Rebecca Bogart’s Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge in the Piano With Rebecca B community. Day 6 The theme for today's challenge is "Try Something New." Ironically, that led me back to something very old: a tried-and-true classical exercise—practicing in chunks of 2, 3, 4, and even 5 notes to smooth out scale and arpeggio passages. The "new" part was shifting into classical mode. Or at least what I think of as classical mode—that focused, nose-to-the-grindstone mindset that says, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to make this two-measure section perfect." I set aside the part of my brain that wants to analyze, improvise, and arrange, and just focused on the notes. It was refreshing. I've been doing so much improvisation and arranging lately that it felt good to sit down, look at the page, and say, "Music, just tell me what to do, and I will do it! "...

This evening I reviewed the B section from this morning and considered changing it from yellow to red (after changing it from green to yellow this morning). I kept it yellow, but it has definitely given me more of a challenge than I expected. Working on the Solo A Section After that, I moved on to the solo A section. The two passages in this batch are four measures each, and the smaller sections definitely made my practice sessions more manageable. I spent 15 minutes on each passage, using the following techniques: Practicing in tiny chunks/rhythms: Because this section has some scale and arpeggio work, it made sense to practice in small chunks, or rhythms as I call it. This is very similar to one of the techniques Rebecca recommends for speed. I'm not going for speed right now so much as muscle memory, and this technique is good for that. Memory: Because we're looking at scales and arpeggios, this section has been easier to memorize. I can't say I can play the whole thing...

As part of Day 5 of Rebecca Bogart ’s Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , the focus is supposed to be speed. I’m not there yet. Nowhere close. I do use her tempo-building techniques in other work—I leaned on them quite a bit in Pineapple Rag , and I’ll be using them tonight on After You’ve Gone as I prep for the graduation video . But for OTJ, speed is going to have to wait. Day 5 Today we leave Batch 1 behind and begin Batch 2. Batch 1 included the eight-measure intro and the sixteen-measure A/A′ section. (There are also two more A sections later—A″ and A‴—so I guess I got a head start on those as well.) Batch 2 consists of: Passage 1: B section (8 measures) Passage 2: solo A section, part 1 (4 measures) Passage 3: solo A section, part 2 (4 measures) The solo A section is firmly red (difficult), so I’m breaking it into smaller chunks. It has eight additional measures I'll address in Batch 3 next week. This Morning’s Practice: Passage 1 I originally marked Passage 1 as gree...

As part of Day 4 of Rebecca Bogart’s Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge, the focus was on identifying leaps and taking steps to make them more reliable. It’s fair to say that the stride arrangement of Ode to Joy has its share of leaps. 🙂 Day 4 The left-hand leaps didn’t get much attention today. They show up in almost every measure, but they’re not a major concern for me because I am the ragtime queen (she writes modestly). Right-hand leaps are a different story. There aren’t many in Batch 1, but there is one spot where the right hand jumps up an octave to begin a short descending run, and that one deserves attention. Today's Wins My biggest win today was locking in the eight-measure intro . It’s not especially difficult, but there are a couple of spots that needed work—the move from A9 to Em7 in the left hand, and the final measure with the augmented chord. I focused on those trouble spots using 3b3 (play three times slowly, take a short break, then repeat). Once those felt...

A few days ago, I set a hard deadline for After You’ve Gone . My plan is to make the graduation video this weekend and be done with it. After a few months of working on it, that feels like the right call. I’ve learned so much—stride tenths, coordination, some improvisation vocabulary—and I even used some of the ideas in YAMS . By any reasonable standard, the Piano With Jonny "After You've Gone" course has done its job. There's still a part of me that really wants to be able to perform  it, and that's where my struggle has been for the past few weeks. And I feel like I'm not even close. I Think This Is What Happens When a Piece Is Too Hard This piece has never quite settled for me. The arrangement section still feels slippery. I can play the rolling tenths, but it feels like my fingers are wearing roller skates—nothing is fully grounded. (Maybe it's my smaller-than-average hands.) And even though I switch to the easier four-on-the-floor for the solo/improv...

As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...

In today's live Q&A, Jonny May said something that stuck with me, and not in a good way: "If a piece takes you more than two months to learn, it’s probably too hard for you." Hoo boy. That didn’t sit well. I can’t even remember the last time I learned anything in under two months unless it was something relatively simple, like the Chopin A minor waltz. My immediate reaction was: Wait… am I constantly working on pieces that are too hard? My previous (classical) teachers took almost the opposite approach. Deborah , in particular, encouraged me to reach beyond my limits—to stretch, to struggle a bit, to take on things that felt just out of reach. And I do think that made me better. But I also have to admit something: I’ve been struggling a lot. The Case of After You’ve Gone First of all, After You've Gone wasn’t meant to be a performance piece. It was supposed to be a training piece—a way to work on stride, coordination, and improvisation. Here’s how that went: It t...

Folks, I’m getting close. I'm not there yet, but something has finally shifted with the solo section. It's like I’ve been on a long C-curve, improving at a glacial pace, and then suddenly… it’s starting to sound like music. I’m still under tempo, but even when I push it a bit, the crashes and freeze-ups are happening far less often. What’s really encouraging is that I’ve started to build a small vocabulary—riffs, I suppose—that I can rely on for certain progressions. I’ve got a couple for F6–Fm6, one cheeky one for C6–F7, and a nice descending idea for Em7–A7. I move into syncopated blocked chords for both C6–E7–Am7–D7 and Gm7–C9, and I’ve got two riffs that work over Dm7–G7. For everything else, I’m mostly outlining the chord or using blocked chords, but even there, a few ideas are starting to show up. This has been a bit of a lightbulb moment. The riffs aren’t just “nice ideas”; they're doing real work, reducing real cognitive load. Instead of trying to invent something f...

This is not really a performance. It’s a sight-read—my second pass through Jonny May’s Ode to Joy . I first sight-read it yesterday while trying to figure out which sections would be the most challenging. Today I played it once more for the "before" video. I’m posting it as a reminder: every piece I eventually play well starts like this. Slow, uneven, and occasionally unrecognizable as music. What I’m Actually Working Toward My main goal with this piece is to collect arranging “tools.” But I also want to learn the piece itself, because it’s too good not to. Right now, it sounds great when Jonny plays it .  I assume it will also sound good when I play it, and hopefully it will feel great once it's under my hands. That said, this won’t be quick. The left-hand jumps are manageable, but the right hand stays busy, and the tempo seriously moves. A Rough Time Estimate Difficulty-wise, Ode to Joy feels comparable to pieces like Jingle Bells Rag , America the Beautiful , or maybe ...

 The past week of my piano life has been a bit out of the ordinary. For one thing, it was spring break, and we spent five days in Pensacola Beach, Florida. I'd hoped to pack the 61-key Yamaha, but there was no room—which was probably for the best, since I got a surprising amount of practice-adjacent work done. On the 7-hour drive down, I did a harmonic analysis of Jonny May's Ode To Joy, which I'll begin learning to play in earnest once I've graduated from After You've Gone (soon!). It took a while, but it was such a good use of time, and I never would have done it with a keyboard in front of me. Once I'd written it all out, I grouped the chords into recognizable patterns, labeled the sections, and added notes to make the analysis easier to navigate. (For any music theoreticians looking at this, I can promise you it isn't a perfect analysis!)  Then I listened to Jonny's arrangement while reading along ... and wow, what a different perspective that gave...

I had Friday off from work, which meant three glorious days with Tall Nick (my piano). Or at least three days featuring several hours of practice. My goals? Continue my work with After You've Gone , dive a little deeper into Lead Sheets Lesson 7 , explore a couple of possible tunes for a new arranging project, and take whatever courses were next in the Analysis 1 track on Piano With Jonny . The Wonder of Analysis It's so funny that I love analysis so much now, because I hated it most of my years as a piano student. Mention "theory" and I would run screaming in the other direction. Now I can't seem to get enough of it. The first analysis course of my three-day piano-fest was Passing Chords and Reharmonization 1 . I actually started this course a couple of years ago when learning Jonny's bluesy Amazing Grace, but the material was just a little too challenging then and I set it aside. This time? It mostly felt like review. The secondary dominants lesson, which ha...

I think I'll be ready to make a graduation video for After You've Gone by mid-month ... and that's despite being nearly derailed after weeks of progress. The culprit? The pedal. Or the lack of one. I explain more in the video: I've made a lot of progress on this project over the last couple of weeks. The left hand jumps feel genuinely automatic now, and I honestly had started to wonder if it would ever get there. The right hand is doing what it needs to do, and I have to admit that my rolls and punches are sounding really nice. Even the improvisation is starting to click, though that's the part that still needs the most work. But then I cut the pedal, and it was like learning a different piece. I almost never play completely pedal-free, unless maybe it's Bach ... and even then I'll sneak a little in. So removing it in stride piano—where I primarily used it to connect my rolled tenths—was kind of a shock to my system. It threw off my timing, my tone expecta...

 Here is my PWJ recital performance of "You Are My Sunshine," starting at around 51:20. I am a big nerd and forgot to put the cat toy away, but I'm still very glad I got through this without any major mishaps.