Friday, February 13, 2009
Session #78
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I first worked on Bach. I had been relearning this before I had to temporarily discontinue meeting with that student to learn music, but figured I should review what I learned.
I had some trouble remembering everything, since it had been a while. However, I kept working on it, and am pretty sure I got it. I still want to review it though whenever I get more time.
I just worked through what I knew to make it smoother. I’m not really working on phrasing too much yet.
Session #79
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I worked on diminished 7th arpeggios. I had forgotten at first, and started working on harmonic scales instead for a minute or so.
Instead of focusing on just one key as I had been doing in the past, I got the idea to try to get through as many as possible at a given speed. So, I tried 96 BPM for all diminished arpeggios.
I had a lot of trouble on Eb for some reason. Another thing I don’t like about it is that it’s not smooth enough to me at the cross-over on C.
I think, though I can’t remember, that I ended at Ab, though I never actually got it to 96. I ended by playing it without the metronome several times to get the feel of it in my fingers.
- Time: 09:05:28 AM-09:36:54 AM
- Length: 0:31:28
- Focus: Arpeggios
- Average session: 0:30:04
- Session trend: 0:24:18
Session #80
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I worked on harmonic scales. I got from C-Bb.
I had a lot of trouble on F# and Bb. On Bb, I have trouble with getting finger 3 on the A, since it is a bit of a stretch between 4 and 3 from F# to A.
- Time: 09:42:18 AM-10:14:48 AM
- Length: 0:31:30
- Focus: Scales
- Average session: 0:30:05
- Session trend: 0:25:01
Session #81
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I worked on the piano concerto. I just wanted to drill certain difficult sections.
I started from the beginning, as I usually do, but once I got into the piece, I decided it’d be better and more effective if I just drilled specific difficult parts, instead of just trying to play through it with the goal of moving on.
That proved to be rather helpful, and I think that’s a much better way of practicing it. I’m going to try to keep doing that, and will report how it goes.
I’m far from happy with it at this point. I played this piece for someone this that morning, and they asked how I would say I did. I said I’d rate it a 7 out of 10. Many things need to be faster and more polished.
One of the parts I made some progress on was starting around page 18, where the left hand has those arpeggios accompanying the right hand, which has the melody, mostly in the form of octaves. I have trouble playing the left hand softly enough.
So, I played it softly, but very slowly. Then, I took that feeling, and just sped it up gradually (or maybe not so gradually). It was instantly softer! I felt like my fingers were drifting up and down the keys. I want to do a lot more work with that.
Statistics
- Time practiced: 1:58:20
- Total time practiced: 40:45:29
- Sessions: 4
- Average session: 0:29:35
- Longest session: 0:38:15 in session #81
- Average time per day: 0:50:57
- Time per day trend: 1:07:36
- Average sessions per day: 1.69
- Sessions per day trend: 2.56
- Estimates:
- This week (week #7):
- Time: 8:15:09
- Sessions: 20
- This month (February):
- Time: 31:24:56
- Sessions: 75
- This year (2009):
- Time: 313:19:39
- Sessions: 623
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