Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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...

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...

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in Lesson 5 (Minor Turnaround Progression) of PWJ’s Play Lead Sheets with 7th Chords course. It has some weird (to me) chords—half-diminished, iv7s, etc.—and at first I wasn’t sure I would like it. It just sounded so lugubrious . But I'm a good little Piano With Jonny student, so I bit the bullet and started the lesson. There are four suggested lead sheets for learning and practicing this progression: In This Quiet Hour (Jonny’s 8-bar educational tune for the lesson) Lullaby of Birdland You Don’t Know What Love Is Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise I started with “In This Quiet Hour” and then began listening seriously to the other three. I made a playlist with multiple recordings of each song and listened while driving, working, walking. I didn’t know any of them when I started, but now I know and love them (except maybe “You Don’t Know What Love Is”… just too depressing!). Then I printed out The Great Gig Book as a birthday gift to myself, an...

The PWJ "Love Progression" goes as follows: I - V (over 3) - iii - vi (over 3) - IV - I (over 3) - ii7 - V - I In the challenge, you play each chord (as broken chords) in the left hand for one measure before moving to the next. So in 4/4 time, you have four beats per chord. I decided to experiment and change chords every two beats instead of every four ... and I liked it! The slower pace has an open, contemporary feel. The faster pace feels more circular and driving. A little more Pachelbel, a little less Yanni. Both approaches work, but I decided to submit my faster version for the challenge. The audio quality of this video leaves much to be desired, and reminds me that I need to run the sound directly from my phone into my phone with a cable. Yet another project for my to-do list. For now, enjoy this slightly fuzzy-sounding improvisation on the "Love Progression" for PWJ's February Challenge!

My sweet girl is now 16 years old, with a driver's license! And she drove herself to school for the first time this morning! I'm so proud of her I could burst. I also felt a little weepy and nostalgic this morning. The song "Turn Around, Little One" was on my mind, so I figured it out by ear and made this quick video before leaving for work. Enjoy!

February practices are going pretty well, particularly considering I haven't had as much time for piano this month. I've done a pretty good job of balancing things, and my percentage goals have guaranteed that I would spend more time on You Are My Sunshine and Amazing Grace -- two songs that I fiddle around with now and then, each time thinking, "One of these days I need to really work on this." This morning I focused on Amazing Grace. Here is a video where I explore some of my improv ideas. I'm having so much fun.

 I feel like I could write so many blues songs about this past week! "First-World Blues" would probably be the most appropriate title, but I have so many more in mind. Six-head Blues Alopecia Blues Itchy Back Blues Outta Zoloft Blues Home Alone Blues Working Mom Blues Leave Me Alone Blues Leaky Coffee Pot Blues Car-In-The-Shop Blues Bloaty Prednisone Blues Silent Desperation Blues No-Time-For-Piano Blues Dirt-On-The-Carpet Blues Lost-My-Hearing-Aid Blues God's-Given-Up-On-Me Blues There is just so much to choose from! This video doesn't have a title. It's not a song. I'm just noodling at the piano, feeling these melancholy blues that have set in. Sad as I'm feeling these days, I'm grateful to be able to play this way.

I found myself with an unexpectedly capacious amount of time for piano practice this weekend--and my wrist didn't hurt at all! I have no idea how long I practiced, but I estimate it was around seven hours over the two days. I tracked my time on Saturday (103 minutes on Liszt and 90 minutes on Jingle Bells Rag). But Sunday? I have no idea. I spent nearly all of Sunday's practice on ragtime. Technically, I was working on Jingle Bells Rag, but I was working more on improvisation and arranging. I came up with my own little arrangement for the first instance of the verse after the crossed-hands section. I'll share it here, even though it sounds terrible--not only is it plinky because I had the piano on a low volume due to family members sleeping, but I accidentally cut off the first second or two. But here it is: The "Nina elements" of this are (1) the off-beat notes in the melody, (2) the harmonized chromatics as filler, (3) the ending of the first part with the held ...

 I am putting together a medley of my dad's favorite hymns to play at his funeral. One is "The Old Rugged Cross." This video shows two styles: one is the simple style I've always used, and the other uses the gospel/blues style I've been learning at Piano With Jonny . The gospel version needs more embellishments and chord subs, I think ... but I'm off to a good start. Please try to ignore the many errors -- I was making this up as I went! (The music is just a hymnbook. Both versions that I play are improvisations on what's in the hymnbook.)

I'm taking the PWJ "Play Piano with Lead Sheets and Seventh Chords" course, and the first two chord progressions he covers are the Cycle of Fifths Progression (which I wrote about  here ) and the Turnaround progression, which goes from I to vi7 to ii7 to V7 and back to I. The turnaround progression is what I think of as the "Prison Progression." Do you remember my early blog post about the rusty lock and key ? Where I felt like I was stuck inside a room and couldn't get out? One of the elements of that room was the Prison Progression. Whenever I would try to write music or improvise on my own, I would try all kinds of different chords, but I would keep falling back in to the Prison Progression. My left hand would play broken root-position chords (I wrote about that  here  and elsewhere), my right hand would mildly improvise a tune, and I would move slowly, predictably, from I to vi7 to ii7 to V7 and back to I. Why? Why couldn't I break out of that patte...

A few days ago, I wrote about my lack of enthusiasm for minor sevenths , my Level 4 Foundations focus for the month at Piano With Jonny . At the end of that post, I wrote that I might try to "improvise/compose something, maybe, that manages to be based in minor sevenths without sounding lost and listless." Sunday night when we got home from the volleyball party, I myself was feeling a little lost and listless. I'm not sure why. Part of it is I'm sad that yet another club volleyball season is over. I was also tired, and my teen daughter and I weren't getting along, and ... I just felt sad. Even though it was after 9pm on a Sunday night, I sat down to practice for a few minutes ... but nothing was working. Not only that, I didn't feel like practicing anything. I wasn't in the mood for happy, bouncy ragtime, so no Maple Leaf Rag or Bare Necessities. My Chopin Nocturne would have matched my mood, but I didn't want to think that hard. I just wanted to play ...

My goals, at least those in the classical music sphere, seem to oppose each other: (1) To refine my skills to what they were when I was studying with Deborah, and maybe even go beyond that. (2) To have fun and not take piano so seriously that I drop everything else in my life. When I was studying with Deborah, at least for the first year or two, I practiced several hours a day most days. I was working full time, but my husband was rarely home and I didn't have kids at the time, so I could do that. I can't now ... but I'm going to be tempted. I know that. Anyway, I didn't come on here today to write about my classical music goals. I want to discuss a goal that's kind of a jazz goal, but, really, it's just a general goal. I want to be able to do the kind of thing I'm doing here with "The Long and Winding Road," only in a much more sophisticated, creative way. \ I want to have a better sense of what notes will work with improvisation, and what chord ...

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...

 I'm going to write a little more about "my usual patterns" (or "my signature sound") soon. For now, I want to put this up here. It's an improvisation of "Over the Rainbow" that I came up with one night. It's such a beautiful song that it's hard to play an ugly arrangement, even with the few missed notes and overly long pauses I have here. Enjoy!