Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

What does it feel like to learn music under deadline pressure, the way a working musician has to? Apparently, I have given myself the chance to find out. On Monday I did a dumb thing and signed up for the Piano With Jonny Student Recital on June 18. The problem: neither of my two potential recital pieces is quite ready. If the recital were July 18, I’d be able to take my pick. But it’s June 18, which means I have about four weeks. So here’s what I’m working with. After You’ve Gone I learned Jonny May’s stride arrangement of After You’ve Gone earlier this year, but the improv solo section was giving me headaches, so I set it aside. I picked it up again a few weeks ago and found I have renewed interest and something of a vision for what it can become. I could sit down and play the version I learned earlier for the recital right now — muddle through the improv section, play the simple stock outro I added a few days ago, and call it done. And that may indeed be what I play on June 18. But...

I had kind of an awakening during my “After You’ve Gone” improv practice session yesterday. I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I watched the video (below), I realized I’ve hit a milestone. I’m no longer wondering “am I doing this right” but am instead thinking things like “how do I want this to sound?” I’ve stopped thinking like a student and started thinking like an arranger. But whew, it has felt like a long road to get here. The Piece and the Problem I started Jonny May’s advanced arrangement of “After You’ve Gone” in January. It’s a wonderful and challenging arrangement with stride tenths in the left hand and a swinging melody full of slides, rolls, and crunchy harmonies. And of course, Jonny encourages you to come up with an improvised solo. I struggled through the arrangement itself for a couple of months, and it sounded passably good (not great) by the end of February. But the improv section? Couldn’t do it. Even using the “easy” four-on-the-floor left hand, I just kept hit...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When I was a kid (and a teenager… and honestly even into my twenties), my greatest temptation at the piano was speed. If there was a run, I wanted it faster. If there were sparkling sixteenth notes, I wanted them to blur. I loved pieces like Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor (K. 310)  and Schubert's Op. 90, No. 2 because they gave me an excuse to race. I could play fast, or at least I thought I could. And I was more than happy to demonstrate that fact. The problem was that fast and good are not the same thing. Back then, my teachers would say things like, “If you can’t play it at 60, you can’t play it at 120.” I nodded. Then I went home and promptly practiced at 120. What I didn’t understand at the time was that playing fast before something is secure doesn’t save time. It adds time. Or, more accurately, it wastes it. I would “learn” a piece, but it was never really solid — never fully mapped in my head or dependable in my hands. If you’d asked me where the harmony was going, or why that...

Tall Nick (the new piano) and I did not get along very well this weekend. Several of my projects (Lead Sheets Lesson 4, After You've Gone, and St. Louis Blues) felt ready for a video I could share on PWJ. So I decided that on Saturday, in addition to practicing my maintenance pieces, I would make a few videos. Ha. Haha. I could write about my adventures with all three would-be videos, but I'll limit this blog post to After You've Gone. Saturday morning, with the family gone and the house all to myself for many glorious hours, I sat down at Tall Nick, ready to record a good progress video of After You’ve Gone. It was a reasonable goal; I’d been working on the left-hand stride and right-hand melody for a couple of weeks. I had it by memory and felt comfortable with it. I was basically there . Ha. Haha. What followed was a familiar spiral: take after take, none of them good. I would get lost after the first measure, or I'd make it through the whole song and then crash and ...

About a week ago, I recorded this video showing my progress with Lesson 2 of After You’ve Gone (AYG). It features the “intermediate” stride left hand. I was planning to move on to the advanced version (with tenths), but then two things happened: (1) pain in my left wrist, and (2) an unexpected five-day trip to North Carolina (where all I have is a little Yamaha keyboard). I initially thought about shifting my focus to Lesson 3 (right-hand stylizations), and I did that for a couple of days. But it was really hard to practice those on my toy-adjacent Yamaha, so I decided to set AYG aside until I could get back to a real piano. Friends, I will be back at my real piano tonight! My wrist is feeling fine, so I have the option of returning to Lesson 2 and starting the advanced stride section, or staying with Lesson 3. I may try to do both, but I’m not sure that’s the wisest approach. I’ll probably work primarily on the left hand, while regularly reviewing the right-hand stylizations as I mas...

At Piano With Jonny , there are three learning tracks: Foundations, Styles, and Skills. This year, I’m dividing most of my practice time between the three, and I'll be posting updates on each both here and in the PWJ Community. Within Styles, I'll be spending the first quarter (and possibly the first half) of the year in Ragtime/Stride, after which I'll switch back to Blues. Which brings me to my current course: "After You've Gone," stride-style. Week 1: Melody and Chords (with one stubborn problem) The first lesson strips everything down to just the melody and chords. My goal this week was to memorize both completely. Done. Since it was such a nice tune, and I actually enjoyed playing it using a "four on the floor" style with the root chords, I decided to work just a little harder and to be able to play this bare-bones version at performance level. Not so easy. There was one line that absolutely refused to cooperate—the one where the lyrics go: “Som...

The first few days of January have been some of my best piano days ever. I started a new practice setup, and so far it’s working surprisingly well. I feel focused, energized, and more intentional than I have in a long time. Foundations Level 4 Course: Playing Lead Sheets with Seventh Chords I’m back in the lead sheets course, but this time I’m actually committing instead of endlessly restarting it like a broken record. I already know the first two lessons (circle-of-fifths and turnaround progressions), so I jumped ahead to Lesson 3, which focuses on extended turnarounds. I’m practicing it in C, G, and the most common flat keys (F, Bb, Eb, and Ab), depending on the day. I’m also working on the course’s sample tune, "Gone Away," which has a bossa nova feel. Can’t say I'm much of a bossa nova fan, but I’d like to make a video of this one eventually. It’s not flashy or technically brutal, but at the recommended tempo of 120 bpm it demands focus and consistency. So it's ex...