Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

 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.

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...

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 ...

Folks, I have finished writing my You Are My Sunshine (YAMS) arrangement! Is it ready for performance? No. Will it be ready for the PWJ Student Recital on March 19? Probably not. But are the uncertainties of “I’m not sure what I’ll do in this section” and “I eventually need to figure out an outro” finally behind me? Yes. Do I have every note picked out? Not exactly. But the structure is there—and if the structure is there, the notes will follow. It’s like when I was in college and graduate school, writing papers. The hard part was always the outline. I would spend hours shaping it, developing my thesis, moving pieces around, deciding what belonged where. Once the outline held, the fun began, and I could write a brilliant paper. I don't know how brilliant YAMS will be, but I have to admit that I'm pretty darn proud of it. These two videos are very rough, as I was still working out the structural details, along with a few stylistic ones. In the “Solo” video, I’m experimenting wit...

This morning I worked on the “stride” section of “You Are My Sunshine.” I started writing it as kind of a joke, thinking, “How dissonant can I make this and have it still sound like ‘You Are My Sunshine’?” But then it started to grow on me, and I made some changes, applying what I’ve been learning in my “After You’ve Gone” stride course. So now this section is deliciously rife with 6ths, 9ths, and diminished chords. Not the epitome of sophistication, but I’m excited to move beyond triads and dominant sevenths. For some reason, I’ve struggled with the final measure or so of this section. With the left hand striding on F major, I descend chromatically from an F6 (3rd inversion) to a diminished chord—which diminished chord, I have no idea. Maybe an F diminished? On the keyboard, I’m playing B, D, F, and A♭. From there, the left hand switches to C7 and my right hand descends chromatically to a C9 (B♭ on the bottom), then plays what I think is a C with a flat 9, but which also look...

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to  IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

I bit the bullet. I signed up for the Piano With Jonny Student Recital on Thursday, March 19. It’s in the middle of the workday, which means I’ll either be working from home with a very strategic “lunch break” or taking the day off entirely. Given how busy things have been lately, I kind of like the idea of a day off. What will I play? "You Are My Sunshine," of course! I’ve known for a while that the only way this arrangement will ever reach the finish line is if I give it a hard deadline. Otherwise, it remains "this fun thing I'm working on" forever. Now it has to become something real . Like the velveteen rabbit. So I have five weeks to prepare. I think that's enough time. Thinking Strategically Last night I divided the arrangement into 13 sections and tried to rate each one from 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “needs serious work” and 5 meaning “performance-ready.” The rating system fell apart pretty quickly, though. Some sections are musically finished but not d...

A few days ago, I mentioned that I’d shared a rough version of my "You Are My Sunshine" arrangement with the PWJ community. I got some feedback, which I appreciated, but I’ll admit I was hoping for more pointed critique. I wanted someone to really poke at it and tell me what wasn’t working. Then Jonny May himself commented. He said many generous things about the arrangement, which meant a lot. But what mattered more were the specific suggestions he offered for how I might push it further. That kind of feedback is even more valuable because it gives me something to work on instead of something to simply feel good about. At Tuesday’s “Ask Jonny” Q&A, I worked up the nerve to ask him about possible introductions. He paused, played around, thought out loud, and gradually assembled a handful of ideas on the spot. None of them felt rehearsed. All of them were clever, musical, and full of personality. Watching that process was at least as valuable as the ideas themselves. He eve...

I made this video to share with a small group of musician friends for feedback on my YAMS arrangement, which I’m still developing. It collected dust inside my phone for a couple of weeks before I finally decided to let it out into the world. This is not a performance , and it isn’t meant to be evaluated as one. At the time of recording, I was still very much in the arranging phase (still am, to be honest). I hadn’t been practicing this as a complete, polished piece, and any continuity you hear is simply the byproduct of experimenting with ideas until certain sections started to take shape. What I was hoping for, and what I received, was feedback on the music itself: the structure, the flow, the character, and where things might be expanded or made more interesting. That feedback has already given me several new directions to explore. I’ll be away from my main piano for a few days, but I’ll have a keyboard with me and plan to keep working on the intro and a stronger outro. When those id...

Guess what! It's another YAMS video! In this video, I work through a couple of small issues that I've needed to address for a while. Today was the day, and both issues turned out to have simple fixes. One involved switching the rag roll early to avoid weird stretches and jumps, and the other involved playing a minor sixth (A to F) rather than an octave for a cleaner ending. I won't go into detail here because it's all in the video!

Is there anything more boring than pedaling? It's one of those things you don't think about—until you need it to swoop in like a superhero to save your unintentionally choppy notes. This morning I found myself thinking about pedaling in my "You Are My Sunshine" arrangement. So far, the only real pedaling I've used has been for the "stride pedaling effect" in the second playthrough, toward the beginning of the arrangement. But when I listened to my videos from yesterday , I realized I'm having to "cut short" some notes in the section where I'm crossing hands back and forth. It makes sense. If I'm pressing a key in the bass and have to rush to get to the high treble, I'm going to have to pick up a little sooner than I might otherwise. The result is a short, rushed sound at the end of each phrase. Hence the need for pedal—specifically the sustain pedal to do some connective work while my right hand is in midair. So in my brief pian...

In this video, I walk through my "You Are My Sunshine" arrangement, demonstrating bits and pieces of the different sections and sharing a few thoughts along the way. I'm planning to submit my arrangement for feedback through Piano With Jonny , either at the live "Ask Jonny" Q&A or in the monthly Q&A with Daine Jordan. I'll probably do the monthly one; I tend to get a little flustered playing for a group. Another option is to make a video of the whole thing (with no talking) and post it the group with a specific request for feedback and suggestions. I actually tried to make that video this morning, but quickly realized my hands want to do something other than what I've written, and I ended up with a standoff between my brain and my hands. Brain vs Hands: The Standoff The brain wants the section to land low, setting up a dramatic leap into what comes next. The hands, on the other hand, keep drifting upward, as if they’d rather linger where the note...

I am absurdly excited today. The kind of excited where I sit down at the piano “just to try something” and suddenly it’s 45 minutes later and I’m pacing around the room narrating my own ideas out loud. I have two videos to share, which means two musical updates! Update #1: Silent Night Rhumba Has Become a Thing This Jonny May arrangement is ridiculously fun. I daresay it's even more fun than Bare Necessities , probably because Bare Necessities, no matter how fun it is, is still hard to play. Silent Night Rhumba isn't easy, but once the groove locks in everything else kind of happens naturally. Like the music knows where to go and I just need to get out of the way. My plan for the full piece is: Simple version first ( video here ) More interesting version next (video below) Solo section that I'm still working on Either a repeat of the more interesting version or go straight into the outro Here's the more interesting version, which I shared on social media last week: My...

One unexpected benefit of this little practice blog? It’s like having a time machine. Sure, I can hear how much I’ve improved (always encouraging on those days when progress feels invisible). But the real surprise is this: I can stumble across ideas I once played, loved ... and then totally forgot about. Case in point: today. I uploaded yesterday's take on the You Are My Sunshine Rag to YouTube. Then, out of curiosity, I went back to my version from two months ago , just to check that I wasn’t repeating myself. (Before yesterday, I don't think I'd touched the piece since then.) Here's what I found: The rag roll section is much more solid now. The little curlicue ending ... still shaky. The best part: I had completely forgotten that, in August, my right hand arpeggiates up an octave halfway through the chorus. It is delightful, and I can't believe I'd forgotten about it! So I'm going to bring back that little arpeggiation next time! For now, here’s yesterday...

When I started playing around with "You Are My Sunshine" as a ragtime piece, I nicknamed it my "YAMS Rag." With Scott Joplin’s Pineapple Rag still fresh in my mind, "YAMS Rag" makes me think of a sweet potato casserole with pineapple. I can almost smell the casserole when I play this. Hmm, maybe I should call it my YUMS rag ... Anyway, I've dabbled with the idea of the YAMS rag for years, but this weekend I decided to look at it more seriously--more like an arranger. I'm using what I've been learning at Piano With Jonny --rag rolls, slides, turns, and other techniques. It's still early, but I got excited and recorded a quick video to share on the PWJ Facebook group. I knew it wasn't polished--it was literally my first day working on it--but I thought it would be fun to show where I'm at. Then someone commented, "Awful." Just that one word. At first, it was kind of funny--who leaves a comment like that on a rough draft? Bu...