Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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...

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 ...

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...