Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

Phase Two is that stage of learning a piano piece where you've learned the fingering, the notes, the rhythms, and the harmonic structure, but you haven’t yet started making music. It’s the stage of slow practice, dynamics work, chunking, rhythmic variations, and slowly, ever so slowly, bringing up the tempo. Phase Two is where the metronome comes into its own. And Phase Two is a grind. It’s hard. It’s nitty-gritty detail work. It feels like one step forward and two steps back, every day, every measure. It comes after the excitement of Phase One, when everything is new and progress feels obvious. Phase Two isn’t exciting the way Phase One is. But it is exciting. It’s a grind, and a grind, and a grind, until suddenly: You play through that difficult passage at 80 bpm five times in a row. You stop consciously thinking about what you’re doing, but your hands still know where to go. The tricky cadence at the end of the section becomes automatic. The runs you drilled an...

I am now on the cusp of Phase 2 of learning Jonny May's Ode to Joy. Phase 1 was all about learning the notes, locking down the rhythms, and refining the fingering. In Phase 2, I will focus on: Dynamics Articulation Phrasing Voicing Tempo (starting at a very comfortable 60 bpm) Memorization Dynamics This is a relatively short piece when played at tempo (about two minutes; less if you're Jonny May), and it would be easy to just play everything loud. But I want the left hand to be a steady presence—not too loud, not too soft—while the right hand does its thing. And the four-on-the-floor sections should, I think, naturally be a little softer than the boom-chick sections. The fun, crunchy transitions between sections should also be just a hair louder than what came before. So I have work to do there, though the dynamics do make sense and mostly come naturally. I just want to make sure they come naturally in performance, and that will take deliberate practice. Articulation and Phrasi...

As part of Day 4 of Rebecca Bogart’s Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge, the focus was on identifying leaps and taking steps to make them more reliable. It’s fair to say that the stride arrangement of Ode to Joy has its share of leaps. 🙂 Day 4 The left-hand leaps didn’t get much attention today. They show up in almost every measure, but they’re not a major concern for me because I am the ragtime queen (she writes modestly). Right-hand leaps are a different story. There aren’t many in Batch 1, but there is one spot where the right hand jumps up an octave to begin a short descending run, and that one deserves attention. Today's Wins My biggest win today was locking in the eight-measure intro . It’s not especially difficult, but there are a couple of spots that needed work—the move from A9 to Em7 in the left hand, and the final measure with the augmented chord. I focused on those trouble spots using 3b3 (play three times slowly, take a short break, then repeat). Once those felt...

As I work through Rebecca Bogart's Learn New Repertoire Faster challenge , I'll be posting more extended updates here on my blog. Days 1–3 Day 1 was analysis, listening, and generally scoping out the territory of the music . The road trip to Florida last week turned out to be Day 1, even if I didn't label it that way at the time. Day 2 was fingering and the start of my first "batch": measures 0-7 (intro), 8-15 (Section A), and 16-23 (Section A'). Day 3 (today) was about recognizing patterns and continuing work on Batch 1. Batch 1: Intro, A, A' The intro isn't difficult, and it will likely be one of the two easiest sections in this piece. Still, the syncopation is a little tricky, so I took some extra time with it. I've already memorized it, as the chord progression is pretty straightforward and the melody is just a single line (no harmony notes). There is one big augmented chord at the end that required some focused work. Sections A and A' ar...

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 ...

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...

Here is a post I shared on in the Piano With Rebecca (PWR) group . I am making important practicing discoveries these days! Retrieving Maintenance Pieces: Lessons Learned On Saturday, I posted that I was about to tackle my neglected maintenance pieces. I was afraid it would be a miserable weekend of stumbling through a dozen or so pieces that I'd worked so hard to learn and memorize in the past year. I started with an interleaved approach (7-minute intervals), alternating between with Mozart's Rondo alla Turca, Jonny May's "Bare Necessities" arrangement and Scott Joplin's "Solace." It was, as expected, quite frustrating as I struggled to re-learn measures I'd mastered just a few months before. Switching to Block-Style Practice In the afternoon, I switched to do a more block-style approach with three other pieces ("The Entertainer," a bluesy "Amazing Grace," and Chopin's Nocturne in F Minor) and accidentally discovered the ...

 I made this video a few days ago but never put it on the blog ... so I'm doing that now. :) By the way, I do not  like my new camera setup because it makes my upper arms look gargantuan. They need some toning, but they're not that huge in real life. (At least I hope they aren't!)

January was not a great month for piano practice. By the time I go to bed tonight, I hope to have reached the 40-hour mark. I normally practice at least 50 hours a month, sometimes 60. Despite my mere 40 hours, I did have a few accomplishments. Learned the entire Liszt piece and can play it, slowly, from beginning to end. Memorized about half of the Liszt. Became much more proficient at playing the two quasi cadenza sections of Liszt. Learned all four sections of Pineapple Rag. Memorized the first two sections of Pineapple Rag. Practiced Bare Necessities enough that I can play it again Learned Czerny Ex. 2. Made it through Lesson 4 of the Bible of Blues Riffs course. In addition, my blues improv of a few weeks ago was recognized yesterday as one of five "standout performances" on the PWJ Members Facebook page! So, it wasn't a terrible month for piano. And I knew going into it that it wasn't going to be a heavy practice month. And it wasn't--I ended up with not one...

Good morning! The volleyball tournament was canceled this weekend because of the weather, so I got to enjoy some bonus practice sessions. Between Friday and Sunday, I practiced almost eight hours ! Snow in Georgia! I have no videos to share (as usual), so I'll just give a recap of my progress, along with this week's goal. Liszt, Liebesträume I can play the second cadenza at a decent (slow, steady) tempo! I found it much easier to learn than the first cadenza. So I have both of those and now just need to work on getting them up to speed. I also spent a lot of time on the difficult middle section (between the two cadenzas) this weekend. It's sounding a lot smoother, and I can play the whole thing by memory. This morning I started working on the final section, following the second cadenza. This week's goals: Drill the final part of the middle section (right before the second cadenza); continue drilling both cadenzas; learn the final section. Joplin, Pineapple Rag I can now...

Today when I opened my practice journal on PWJ , I saw that I've put 484 hours of practice in since joining PWJ on January 30. My home for 484 hours (so far) this year. Wow. Four hundred and eighty-four hours. God willing, I should hit the 500-hour mark in another ten or twelve days. Five hundred hours of practice! At that rate, I'll hit 10,000 hours in just 20 years! 10,000 Hours? Honestly, I wonder if I've put 10,000 hours of practice in by this point in my life. I've never tracked my practice time until this year, so I have no way of knowing. I have had some years where I've practiced this much (and more), but then there have been years of almost no practice. (Five minutes later ...) So, I went into Excel just now and estimated my hours of practice every year since I started playing in 1974. My very first practice session, at age 4, was after church one Sunday evening. I worked and worked and worked at playing "Just As I Am." I have no idea how long it ...

The good news, in the midst of all this despair, is that the long break from piano doesn't seem to have affected my playing. I got to play throughout the day yesterday, and it was sooo nice to (1) be able to play for so long, and (2) sound really good! Morning Practice I tried to work yesterday morning (from home), but I couldn't concentrate. My head hurt, and my eye was (and still is) killing me because I have a scratch on my left cornea. So I told my boss, and she said I have three days of bereavement leave, and to feel free to take some time. So I did. I turned off the computer, went downstairs, and practiced piano for a couple of hours. Mostly I worked on hymns, starting with the PWJ Amazing Grace that I wrote about earlier, and then moving on to a medley I'm arranging of my dad's favorite hymns. I was going to make it three hymns, but I've decided to just do two: In the Garden and The Old Rugged Cross. I'll play through ITG twice (where the second time is ...

 I hit a milestone yesterday: 250 practice hours since I started tracking them back in early February! Here's the breakdown from my Excel file: I'm not sure why Excel numbers don't match the PWJ numbers, so I'll have to revisit the practice log and get that all straightened out ... maybe. I'm not sure it's worth it to go to the trouble. But 250 hours! In about four and a half months! At that rate, I'll hit 1,000 hours in another year or so! I wonder how many hours of my life have been spent practicing piano. I have no idea. Several hundred in some years, to be sure. Maybe more. And a few dozen in other years. Whatever it is ... it's 250 more hours as of today!

I was in North Carolina again this weekend, which meant yet another short break from piano practice. I brought my 61-key keyboard, but I purposely only played it for my dad for a half-hour or so each day and didn't do my usual routine and stay up until the wee hours, practicing. I really was at a low point last week, and I needed a break. A Brief "Bare Necessities" Update The break was good for me. I was too tired to practice much after getting home last night, but I did managed to squeeze in about 40 minutes on Bare Necessities, and the ragtime section is coming along. I'm staying at a manageably slow pace (using the metronome so I don't cheat), and just playing it over and over again, thinking about what chords I am playing, and getting to the notes just a hair before I have to play them. It is a very focused, "in the zone" kind of practicing. By the time I finished last night, I played the whole ragtime section at 100 bpm three times in a row without ...

In my quest to build muscle memory as well as ear/mind memory in the Transcendence, I'm engaging in fast-practice techniques. Friday morning I worked with the metronome and found myself focusing so hard on the notes that I forgot the pedal ... and realized I was playing Chopin like it was stride piano. Readers, it was fun. As I increase the tempo on the metronome, I continued to play stride-style. There is a time and a place, certainly, for working on dynamics, rubato, pedaling, and such ... but there's also a time and place to simply get the hands used to playing the right notes, regardless of all those other things. And it was fun. Here's the video, in case you ever wondered what Chopin sounds like as a stride piano piece! (If Chopin in stride style makes you cringe, be comforted in the fact that I play it properly at the end of the video!)

The last few times I've played through the Chopin Nocturne, I've felt a bit of uncertainty creep in with the Transcendence . Instead of stopping and focusing on the source of uncertainty, I've just been playing through it in the hopes that it will go away. Of course, it doesn't go away. So last night I decided it was time. I needed to deal with the Transcendence. I mean, it's the most beautiful, and the most difficult, part of the entire nocturne. Why does Chopin do this to me? "Yeah, you can play this beautiful, transcendent passage, but you're going to have to put in the time. A lot of time." I made a series of videos that I'm just going to share in a few separate posts on this blog. They involve several different approaches to practicing/learning this section (which I thought I had already learned!!). The videos in this post are from last night, and the videos in the next two posts are from this morning. Last night's focus was on practicing ...

This morning I found myself with an unexpected 45 (or so) minutes for practice. "Bare Necessities" was needing some love, so I committed then and there to devote my full practice time to it. I spent about 25 minutes on Stride Section B and about 20 minutes on Ragtime Section A. The videos below are from the Stride Section B practice. For the most part, it sounds pretty smooth, but there are just a few little areas that are still dogging me, preventing me from playing it at the same tempo as I'm playing Stride Section A. In these videos, I work through one of those sections. Or at least I demonstrate how I work through these kinds of problems. Throughout these videos, I talk like the Southern country bumpkin that I am, saying "Ah" instead of "I," and "Ah'm gonna" instead of "I'm going to." What can I say, I've lived in Georgia for 7 years, and before that, North Carolina, and before that, Louisiana. I'm going to sound...

I know I mentioned previously that I'm now tracking my practice time. I've only been tracking it for about a month, but ... wow! I can't believe I've never done this before. Not Just a Piano Nerd Friends, I am not just a piano nerd. I'm also an Excel spreadsheet nerd, I've decided to track much more than just how much time I'm devoting to each piece/skill. Leaderboards I now have a daily leaderboard so I can make sure I'm not spending too much time each day on the same piece. It's not that I have to spend and equal amount of time on everything, but I do tend to go through phases of focusing on one particular piece while forgetting the others exist, and this will help prevent that. I'm going to have a weekly leaderboard, too. Just because. And heck, maybe I'll end up with monthly and yearly leaderboards. Because leaderboards are fun! Also, because I am a nerd, I am marking the "leaders" in yellow highlight. Other Stuff I'm Tracki...

I had some free time in a waiting room, so I added up my practice hours for March. I updated my March Goals Recap with the total number of hours (50.45), but I thought I'd share the breakdowns here. I spent almost a quarter (23%, or 11.8 hours) of my total practice time on Chopin ... which is interesting because I practiced Chopin only 18 days in March! This was a surprise to me. I would have guess that I'd practiced it every day, except for the few days I was in North Carolina and had only a 61-key keyboard to work with. Only 18 days! Next in the ranking is the Blues Learning Track at PWJ. I started on March 6, but I didn't really start working in it until March 10. I made it through the first three lessons and ended up devoting a full 8.9 hours of practice time over 17 days to the blues. When I was NC and only had that little keyboard, I only worked on the blues--mainly playing the blues scale over the easy and medium shuffles. A full 16% (8 hours) of practice time went ...

 I stumbled across a series of videos by a Dr. Molly Gebrian yesterday. In them, she talks about the importance of taking breaks when you're learning something. The mind needs time to put structures in place to accommodate the new learning, so we need to take breaks to allow it to do that. She compares it to road work: You have to shut down the road in order to repair it. I also think of it as being like pouring concrete. Once you've poured the concrete, you absolutely need to stay off of it for a while so it can harden and thus become useful. If you pour it and then you keep walking on it, trying to even it out here and there, you'll end up with a mess. Similarly, we need to let our brains "cement" the new information before we can build on it. Forced Practice Breaks I think there could be something to this idea. When I was in college (and even during COVID), I would practice several hours a day, sometimes several times a day, but I was often frustrated at how sl...