Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

Well… I had a major piano development last weekend and somehow didn’t write about it. I PLAYED BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE (BWV 846) IN ALL 12 KEYS! Folks, I transposed this baby. No sheet music, no written progressions, no lead sheet. Just what’s been settling into my brain over the past couple of weeks. I’d been experimenting with transposing it here and there, but the switch flipped sometime Saturday evening. I played it from memory in C, then transposed to G. Then F. Then B♭. Then E♭. Those went pretty smoothly, since I've tried transposing to those keys before. But then, at some point, I thought, “What about A♭?” So I tried it ... and it wasn't hard. So I moved on to D♭. Then G♭ (not exactly a friendly key). Still worked. Then B (even less friendly). A few stumbles, but I made it through. Then E, A, and D ... and they felt easy. Then G, then C ... full circle! I was in a serious flow state. Part of it was the prelude itself—I could listen to it all day—but a bigger part was...

I’m learning to transpose songs using numbers. Numbered chords (I, IV, ii7, V7, etc.) were already familiar to me, so that part of PWJ’s Transposing from a Lead Sheet course felt comfortable. But transposing the melody? That's a whole new ballgame. It’s not just “this is a I chord, this is a IV chord.” It’s assigning a number (the scale degree) to every note in the melody and memorizing them. I know this is going to get easier. In fact, it already is. I’m starting to hear the melody and think, “that’s the 5,” or “that’s a sharp 4.” It’s taken a lot of focused work. A lot of “deep practice,” as they call it. In this video, I’m playing the melody to "Makin’ Whoopee" in several different keys. My brain isn’t thinking of note names (Eb, F, etc.); it’s thinking in numbers. In Eb, G is 3, B natural is #5, and so on. I’m able to play through the melody relatively smoothly, even as the key changes. I’ve been at my mom’s house in North Carolina for most of the past week. With a h...