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That sounds brilliant, Stubbie!!

good luck with the new teacher Stubbie, that sounds fantastic.

My ATOW was simply a decision to start interval exercises as of today. Why I haven't done so yet is a mystery, I guess I may have hoped it would develop naturally (although it has for easy intervals). So armed with a set of flashcards, a few minutes a day working at them should be enough.

Hey eom--have you tried the exercises on musictheory.net ?
You can set it up at varying levels of difficulty depending on how much you want to think.

+1 to that... that website has done me a ton of good. Highly recommended.

thanks for the info, will certainly look into this website.

Amazing website, really helpful.

Many thanks for the tip, I hadn't heard about it.

Agreed, great website

For the first time I understood why people said "the piano sings" or this piano is singing beatifully. When my teacher played a tune on the grand I was confused and wondered when did someone start to sing only after like 2 seconds I heard that it was actually the piano that sang.This is my best musical experience so far.

Stubbie, that is great news! I hope it all works out. Keep us posted.

Stubbie - Good luck with your teacher!

No major AOTW for me.
I decided to track all my practice sessions and the idea is to calculate the total playing time by month / year. I have created a sheet with all days of the year, and I have a stopwatch to use each time I sit down at the piano. At the end of the day, I write the total time played, on the sheet.

I use this system since middle October, and because I play with the rule "everytime I can", sometimes I'm surprised with the time I spend playing the piano...

If you want, you can download the file here: Piano Practice Time.pdf

Thanks, Carlos! That will go nicely with this nifty cumulative timer (which cost less when I bought mine... Amazon prices fluctuate). It's designed to cumulatively tally a child's reading time per day, but it's perfect for someone like me who practices over multiple shorter sessions per day.

(New year's resolution: to actually use it for piano! It rapidly got stolen away for other applications. Thus Carlos' time sheet to the rescue...)

@Stubbie good news!
@Carlos I stopped being an consultant recently so my time with timesheets is over It ought to be fun
@torquenale I'll probably get a Zoom as well but not an H4. I need something to do my first recording since the sound out of my videocamera is crap.

My achievements of the week are: Starting on the Wild Horse Rider from Schumann and improving the other two (Melody and Humming Song).

Edit: Although I started on the Wild Horse Rider I don't think I'll be able to play it in the correct tempo any time soon. Watched a couple of youtube video's which was a shock, wow, it's played FAST.

tangleweeds, if you have an android device you can install this Free Time Logger . It's free and works fine.

So much achievement already this week.
Stubby I am happy for you. I changed teacher last year and it was the best thing I did. Good luck to you.

I'm writing this in an Indian restaurant on my way back from my Saturday noon lesson. Noon lesson makes me hungry. But it's nice she could stretch lesson time if we need to. Went over Bach prelude and Chopin nocturne fingerlings. I can play through both of them now with the books with hick ups here and there. She changed a couple of fingerlings but mostly agreed with my fingerlings. She had one suggestion on the dynamics but liked the way I emphasized some inner voices. Nocturne - she helped me fix awkward spots. Overall pretty good lesson. Earlier in the week I enjoyed Diabelli sonatine for four hands with my real life piano friend. I have never seen the score. I was happy that I was able to pull it through. It's not a difficult piece and I did not observe all the articulation but it made me feel so good. I couldn't have imagined this one year ago.

A belated happy birthday to Farmgirl.

Week 95: I spend some time on review. I had a week off because of injury and a week off a month ago because of the funeral, so any progress is likely imagined. I listen to some of my old pieces. I revive a couple of them, fail at some others. Some are not worth reviving. I find too many pieces to squeeze into the 20% of time that I have allocated. It is distressing to pick, but some must be shelved.

I purchased and downloaded the sheet music for Colder Weather, a pop/country song by the Zac Brown band. I heard it on the TV show The Sing-Off. I make modest progress. I bought the guitar/vocal version because it was fewer pages (6 pages vs. 9 pages for the piano/vocal/guitar version). I don't like having so many pages, especially for a simple pop song. I am glad I did not try to sound it all out, because as I look at the melody line I would have taken a long time to get some of the notes. I find out that the band does it at an odd tuning, making it more difficult for folks trying to play it by ear. More likely, I would have worked on playing it by ear for a couple of weeks and given up in disgust.

As is usually the case, I want to do my own arrangement, so it is likely a long project. One reason I wanted the song is the title, Colder Weather. However, by the time I arrange it, learn it, polish it, it will almost certainly be spring.

I continue to polish up the instrumental that I was working on when my dad passed away. The title is Tracks in the Snow. My father had a December birthday. While the music doesn't have any direct story connection to him, the timing and the title gives some sense of connection. As always, it is hard to tell whether audiences will like it or not.

I have a Songmakers meeting in two more weeks. I plan on my originals: Tracks in the Snow, Wits End and Pachobel's Canon in D. If attendance is low, like it has been, I may need a couple of more pieces. It is a challenge to memorize so many. Between my nerves and my poor sight reading, the scores are not that useful to have during a live performance and sometimes make the nerves worse.

Well I awoke in the midst of a "whiteout" this morning, unable to navigate the driveway not to mention getting off to church (9 miles away). I have just had a wonderful practice session with Sorrento, my domain on which to Focus.

I once again have this piece under my fingers smoothly with both hands although not to the tempo I had it before, which, BTW wasn't all that great.

The weather guessers are predicting 8-12" (already 6") total snowfall today so I expect to make more progress on this later, since I won't be leaving the house.

The sorting out of my "piling system" is next, I have far too much music out and strung about to tempt me away from my focus. I will say, it is beautiful outside but not tempted to go out into it for sure. I'm staying in my jammies `till noon at least

I'm pleased with my AsOTW. My interview tomorrow is postponed until the roads are cleared, Worst storm here since 1983 so hoo nose how long that will take.

Happy New Year, everyone!

My AOTW is getting organized and building a piano roadmap for 2014. The FOYD thread has been so helpful, I decided to design a weekly practice sheet, to record goals and practice times for technical work, etudes, pieces with deadlines, repertoire to practice, and sight-reading. I have enough pieces on the go that it helps to have a guide to make my practice time more efficient. So far I am finding the worksheet very helpful to organize my time and improve my focus. Hopefully I am getting better at practicing!

We're not getting too bad. Some snow. Right now it's 3 out. Supposed to go down today. Reach a low of about -14. Wind is blowing hard. Bad wind chills.

I have to admit. If I had a house. I'd have a portable generator. That getting caught with no power and below zero. It ain't swift.

Seen all the news about you people getting the worst storm since....

I'm guessing Alaska is still nice? They sent their weather down here.
Nice pics of the baby Moose, Ladypayne has on the Piano Bar.

EDIT: We just dipped below zero. It's 8:30am. Won't be back above till after noon tomorrow. We don't worry. It was 55 on Friday. Will see 55 again in a few days.

My weekly report. It's been an exciting week for me musically. Cracked the can can on the head and started working on chiapanecas which I really really like the sound of. A lot of my time this week though has been spent recording, first recording onto the Yamaha p105, then transferring to zoom r8, then transferring to laptop, then to smartphone then to soundcloud my username on soundcloud is 'Paul Hodges 2' don't know the url . I live near Cambridge, UK btw. Thanks for comments am trying to post video but don't Have broadband here in caravan haha.

Your Can Can was very lively paul1971 so well done. Co-incidentally it was a year ago this month I was struggling with this very piece (albeit a different version). I had a great year despite finding it tough so who knows where you will be this time next year.