Practice Journal: Day #2

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Time practiced: 2 hours, 6 minutes

Statistics

Time practiced this week: 2 hours, 56 minutes
Total time practiced: 2 hours, 56 minutes in 2 days
Average time practiced per day: 1 hour, 22 minutes
Average session length: 44 minutes

Session #2

Time: 4:50 PM-5:10 PM
Length: 20 minutes

Rachmaninoff: Polichinelle in F-sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 4

I just played through this piece a bit, but didn’t do very much structured practice. I was cut short a bit since my mom came home from work. I was just trying to get the new part I had learned at my lesson better into memory and into my hands.

Session #3

Time: 6:30 PM-7:38 PM
Length: 1 hour, 8 minutes

For this and session #4, I was at a church to practice, instead of on my keyboard.

Scales

I worked on the C and C# major and minor (natural, melodic, harmonic) scales, as well as the diminished and dominant 7^th arpeggios for the same keys.

I know I need to work on more, but I’ve also been working on speed, and that in itself took me about 25 minutes to get through everything satisfactorily.

I wanted to work on these since I was on a decent piano, and it’s totally different than on the keyboard. It was a little harder because of the weight of the keys, so I had trouble keeping my previous speeds, and had to slow down a bit for some. Also, I seemed to have trouble being stable on the black keys; that is, I kept slipping off.

However, for the scales, I mostly stayed between 92-100 BPM. For the arpeggios, however, I had a horrible time, especially with the C# dominant 7^th. I couldn’t play it perfectly consistently until I slowed down to 66. I’ll be working on that a lot more in the future.

Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22: 1. Andante sostenuto

I played through the piece, just to make sure I still had everything, since I had been focusing a little too much on Rachmaninoff lately.

After that, I went back primarily to the right-hand descending G minor arpeggio near the beginning, in the solo piano section.

In session #1 on Monday, I mentioned that I had shifted my hand to the right a bit, and that helped. Well, I combined that with something else this time that seemed to help even more.

I realized that I was reaching all the way up there without hardly shifting my body, so it was obviously harder to play it accurately. I observed that if I shifted my body along with my hand, I could play it much more accurately.

I’m still experimenting with this. It was really accurate at first, and then I think I did it too much and I started to get sloppy. I think I’m onto something, though.

Session #4

Time: 7:47 PM-8:25 PM
Length: 38 minutes

Rachmaninoff: Polichinelle in F-sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 4

I worked a lot on the ending section again, as well as the entire piece. The end is much more difficult than the rest of it, because it adds more notes onto the chords, and at the end there are a lot of jumps. I’m fine with the descending jumps, but octave jumps going up in the right hand are rather challenging, especially when they are going so fast. I think (if I’m counting properly) that this is around measures 124-125, basically 5-6 measures from the end.

I also had a bit of trouble in the left hand, around measure 129. Hitting that first C# is a little challenging when going very fast. However, I’m getting better at it. I learned to jump as quickly as possible, land on the C#, and then play once it is found. This is different, of course, from jumping and playing on whatsoever I land on, which more aptly describes what I was doing before.

Finally, I worked on measures 106-110, where the right hand has fuller chords than in the beginning.

I did figure out a fingering that is much better than what I was doing. On the second half of beat 3 of measure 106, of course it is an octave and I just use 1 and 5. However, on beat for, I use fingers 1, 3, and 4 to play that chord, so I can pivot right back up to the B octave on the second half of four. It is definitely a little of a stretch, and my fingers started to hurt after a while, but I can’t see any other way.

I did the same thing in 107 when shifting down to the E octave with C# in the middle. It seems a lot more natural than using 5 on the top for all of those.

I still have trouble finding the chord in the right hand in measure 109. I’m getting better at it though.

I tried working on measures 111-115, but that is still very awkward, and my fingers were getting sore at this point. Hopefully with practice, that should get easier, too.

Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonata in E major, K.380/L.23/P.483: Andante comodo

I practiced this a little bit, though I have only learned 10 measures of it, so there wasn’t very much to do.

I’m having a lot of trouble in the left hand, however. When I heard the recording, I noticed that the 32^nd notes are played almost like a trill, as far as speed is concerned. I’m having great difficulty doing that in the left hand, in measures 6 and 8. It sounds forced, slow, and clunky. I’ll have to ask my piano teacher at my next lesson how to practice that.

One Response to “Practice Journal: Day #2”

Practice Journal: Day #3 | Blog of the Perpetual Seeker says:

Sunday, January 4, 2009 at 9:51 pm

[...] on measures 107-117 a lot, trying to make that fingering more comfortable. It did go better than last time, when my fingers got [...]

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