Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

I've been doing some of the octave drills from Hanon, but I've also come up with a new octave drill on my own. It involves jumping various intervals repeatedly. I keep my hands two octaves apart, which I think will address at least three challenges: Getting a feel for the distances between intervals Playing ragtime , which often has the oom-pah in the deep bass (at least the "oom" part) while the right hand dances in the higher octaves Training my eyes to have a "center-of-the-piano" focus so that I can focus (peripherally, at least) on both the right hand and the left hand. I've been doing this exercise every day for the past few days, and I can already tell that I'm playing the octaves faster and more accurately, even when I get to the big jumps. I also think my octaves in songs like Bare Necessities and Maple Leaf Rag are sounding a little more solid. ( Here is a recent post on my sloppy octaves in Maple Leaf. This was part of my incentive to wo...

Here are a couple of blues scale patterns that I’ve been doing every day since I learned them a couple of months ago, back when I was on Lesson 3 of the 10-Lesson Blues Challenge at PWJ. (I’m now starting Lesson 8.) One video is of a six-note pattern, and the other is of a 3-note pattern. These were so hard when I first learned them, and they still sometimes take me a second to get in the groove, but I have come a long way with them. 

As I mentioned last week , I'm doing a deep dive into dominant seventh chords during the month of March. Here are a few of the exercises I've been working on. I haven't worked too much on speed, but I'm planning to focus on getting these a little faster/more automatic during the final week of the month. Exercises include: Block chords, counter-clockwise around the circle of fifths Block chords, clockwise around the circle of fifths Broken chords, counter-clockwise; straight eighth notes Broken chords, clockwise; swung eighth notes Block chords, ascending chromatically Broken chords, descending and ascending chromatically Block chords in inversions, counter-clockwise My broken-chord inversions are still a little sloppy, and I still need to work on the V-I movement with inversions. If I do another video on these at the end of the month, those will be included. Enjoy this otherwise very boring video! I do talk a bit in it. I've found that it's much easier to go fr...