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Yes it really was. I always used to get distracted if teacher joined in during lessons, so it was a good accomplishment for me.

Thanks Becca, It wasn't my first attempt, just my first successful one.

Thanks for your kind words EP

[quote=Exalted Wombat Playing a duet was very clever of your teacher. It made you play maybe with a degree of "interpretation" but without losing the rhythmic pulse.

I just see "It's my interpretation!" so often used as an excuse for sloppy playing - slowing down the tricky bits, rushing the hard bits...[/quote]

I agree on both counts. Once she sees I can play my lesson correctly, she's quite lenient to let me "interpret" but not before I demonstrate I can play it as written. Like I said I think she insisted this time because she intended to play it as a duet and my interpretation would make her job harder, as well as maybe compromise the quality of the piece in recital.

WRT to Joplin rags, almost always I hear them played much too fast and some are fast but not all of them.

Well, bless your heart for not laughing at me.

Yes, I was in choir as a child and had piano lessons for a couple years (Thompson red book, very basic stuff).


Yes, I'm just getting to the point where I can read the shapes of chords a bit and not have to pick out each note one by one. It's slow, but noticeable progress.

I'm looking forward to this very much... any advice to hasten the process, or bad habits to avoid that would otherwise retard the process?

I wish I had the time. It's very sporadic. I sometimes go days without any bench time, then have a couple hours at a stretch. Then a couple 10-15 minute stretches the next day, and so on. Very inconsistent, so its hard to make scales and sight reading a priority at the expense of what I'm trying to work on.

I love this suggestion and will adopt it when I start sight reading. It will also serve as a means to track how much I'm actually doing over time as well. I have several sources available to me, mostly hymnals.

As you know, I've been working on Billy Joel -- very difficult to sing along even when I know the song completely cold for both piano and the lyrics. Even then, I can only do it for songs where the melody line is played in the accompaniment. If I'm playing just chords? Fuhgeddaboudit... I can't carry a tune in a bucket without singing in unison along with either another voice or the piano.

I find it so intriguing that your tuner is a she... this is quite rare AFAIK.

Well, what helped me develop quicker recognition was playing pieces that were in the same key for a while, where I saw the same chords over and over : for example the chords I first noticed becoming automatic were E & G, A & D , where E and A are the top notes.



Well, here I would suggest you try to balance out a bit more.
If you can get to the piano every day - even for only 10-15 minutes - heck even 5 minutes! Things will just come together that much better.

Even before I'd heard of the MOYD (master of your own domain) thread, I had committed to playing every day. So far, since Christmas 2009, on the days I have been at home I think I've missed playing twice, for migraine....and other days I've missed have been travel days. Otherwise, it is every day -even if it is only to run through scales for a few minutes.
I find it keeps me focused.




When you start? What are you waiting for???
One thing you will find is that it REALLY makes a difference if you go to pieces that are BELOW your level. It seems like you're going backwards, but you aren't -- you're working at building the skill with pieces you actually have a chance of reading well and playing at tempo fairly quickly!



I think it is rare, even here. Her family is in the piano business so I suspect that's why she got involved. She's wonderful - my first tuner really seemed to question my ability to hear when something wasn't quite right, which I found very offensive.

Just a short post as I need to get back to the piano: my achievement is that have now started on sharps (the joys of being a complete beginner) and that I played my homework pieces well in my lesson. Hope everyone is well, will read all your achievements and catch up later xx

Sharps are no big deal -- but wait til you get to the flats ! lol....sorry, couldn't resist.

My first teacher started me off with 2 lovely pieces that were full of sharps and flats --- 3 of one, 4 of the other -- talk about getting your feet wet quickly!
It really was a great idea as now they don't really "scare" me as much as I think they would without that experience.

BTW... when are we going to see your photos of you piano!!

As soon as I can tear myself away from the piano long enough to upload some!! I promise it will be soon I am really enjoying the sharps so far, they haven't been too bad. I am having a blissful few weeks of seemingly effortless progress simply because I am spending so much time having fun with my piano. Long may it continue!

That's a really good point. I'll try to do that, starting with C#.



This makes a lot of sense to me, easier said than done though. Mind you, this is essentially within my control. I'll explain my circumstances...

Basically, the problem is that I'm lazy beyond belief. I love to do what I love to do, and I cheerfully ignore everything else. "Everything else" includes things like:

- not repairing the fence that blew down during Sandy
- not re-painting a ceiling that was damaged in a flood in 2005
- not filing income tax returns timely
- not refinancing my mortgage at a dramatically lower rate
- not mowing the lawn more than once every 4-6 weeks in the summer
- not closing the pool before freezing temperatures burst pipes
- not opening the pool before an enormous algae bloom winds up costing hundreds of dollars in chemicals to resolve, year after year
- not doing part time work that could net significant amounts of additional income
- not doing dozens of others things that I'm sure I've forgotten entirely

Yes, I have some self-discipline issues -- amongst other issues, ADHD for one.

My wife, understandably, sees red when I am merrily grinding away on the piano. It's almost enough to make me do a better job at all of the above, except I find it incredibly difficult to do any of the things noted above, with a depth that I can't really describe, unless it gets to the point where it simply must be done.

My solution then, is to just practice when she isn't around.
- she runs out for a gallon of milk, and "boo-yah!", I've got 10 minutes of practice time.

- she goes to bible study each week and I get an hour or so before it's time to put the kids* down for bed.

- after church each week I "sneak" up and play the DGX-500 for as long as I can get away with while she is socializing. This bugs her also, BTW, as I often drag it out well into the afternoon, when I could otherwise be tackling aforementioned list of wonderful tasks.

- if I have to run to the church for an errand -- it is a very small church and the two of us are involved in many aspects, so there are myriad excuses to go there throughout the week -- I'll pop up to the sanctuary and squeeze in 5-10 minutes. Well, actually, I'll squeeze in whatever I think I can get away with. Lengthy tasks are awesome because I can tack on 30 minutes and she won't think anything of me being gone for 2.5 hours even though processing the offering, paying the bills for the week, etc. only took 2 hours to complete.

This is starting to feel like a confessional...

So, this is why bench time is so wildly variable. There are many days when she is around the entire time, no excuses to go to church, hence no practice time. Sometimes circumstances collide and I can get 4-6 hours in over a single weekend.

* The kids are starting to resent that I consistently spend that time on the piano instead of with them, except when we need to work on homework. They are really encouraging about the "surprise" Billy Joel song (as you know, but for benefit of others -- see somewhere far above in this thread for explanation), so I remind them that I can't very well practice when she is around. They get that, but still it's not just that one song, and it makes them feel bad that piano is consistently a priority over them whenever Mom is not around. This is a problem, and I'm trying to be more sensitive to their needs, which cuts down on bench time (and rightly so, of course).



Well, see above. It's hard to have any sort of structure under the circumstances, not to mention that I find self-imposed structure to be virtually impossible. Ironically, I am a Project Manager professionally -- so my job is to create and sustain structure for others. I do that fairly well, but need to have it imposed externally for myself!

Bottom line, I have to make some decisions about how to spend my practice time.

Do I continue to focus on challenging stuff that I love, at the expense of a solid foundation? Or do I put the challenging stuff on the shelf (this would be very painful after the time invested so far) and essentially start over? Is there a middle ground that is actually tenable? Or would I just wind up doing both the advanced stuff and the basic stuff poorly?

I'll probably make a separate post to solicit advice on this, so as not to clutter AOTW.



Yes, I definitely have seen this advice previously and have followed it during the small amount of experimentation that I have done with sight reading.

I have a "kid hymnal" that I can use that is more-or-less below my level. Granted, "my level" is a rather hard thing to quantify since I can't actually play anything all the way through at this point, but I am working on fairly difficult material and (I think) holding my own with it.

End of confessional...

I wonder if you could combine kid time with piano somehow? When my kids were little, I never "practiced" (didn't have the time or energy), but I did get some piano time in with them. We'd sit at the piano with a couple books of kid's songs, nursery rhymes, and lullabies; I'd play (good sight-reading practice), and we'd sing together. Those are good memories.

That sounds really nice. My eight year old used to play, and we did "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" as a duet last Christmas, but she's stopped taking lessons and really isn't interested in any organized piano activity at this point.

Once in a while she will noodle for a bit, which gives me hope. She has a natural aptitude and has made pleasant sounding improvisations (only in C, no accidentals) since she was three or four. How many four year olds do you know who could improv for an hour without everyone else in the room dying for them to stop? She took lessons but it was a knock-down drag-out battle to get her to practice, so we finally pulled the plug after 18 months even though she was progressing fairly well.

So I feel like she is squandering her talent, but we can't (and shouldn't) force her to play. I try to encourage her, but I think it just makes her all the more reticent. It's frustrating.

Maybe after I get the piano tuned I can convince her and her sister to sing a Christmas carol together for Mom. I'll try... thanks for the very good suggestion!

You have a very full life A Tall Guy! I'm a bit like you when it comes to doing jobs and strimming the grass LOL.

Toastie can't wait to see your piano's photo!


I may be nuts because I like sharps and flats and after yesterday's lesson I quite like scales! I was proudly telling my Dad today that I can find some scales by ear and I have got better with my sight reading.


Great to read about everyone's progress. I only tinkled a few notes of Largo today on Piano before I went to my Dad's. My excuse tonight is that it is so cold and I am on the couch feeling tired and cold and cuddling a hot water bottle. Roll on Spring!!!

Toastie, I am glad the piano finally appeared.

Week 38: relatively uneventful. I missed a day, and did 15 to 20 minutes the other days. I am in that fog that comes after finishing a piece without having much of the way of new projects. The two Christmas songs, God Rest... and Silent Night sound okay if I play real slow, but not good enough for singing along to.

A big downside to doing known pieces is that every minor mishaps stands out. There are also so many arrangements, that some listeners expect a certain way, and some will not get it. It definitely adds to the tension level when performing a well known piece live.

My right hand is complaining, probably due to too much computer time, and some cool damp weather. Again for those reading the first time, fingerless gloves, limited practice time, and a cold water bottle are some things that I do to manage the discomfort. If discomfort crosses over to pain, rest is often the best course of action.

As for sight reading, people learn at different speeds. While the average piano student might get to a certain level after two years, it might be shorter or longer for others. I am in the well below average group for sight reading, so it might take me ten years to get to any fluency, and that is if I work at it.

I tend to think my time is better spent on writing new original music, because that is my strength. It generally takes me ten times as long to learn a known piece as it does for me to write a new one and polish it up to where I want to perform it.

I again like to suggest the 20/20/20/40 break down in practice time suggested in the book The Musician's Way. If a person is interested in sightreading 20% of the total time. I like 20% on old pieces, 40% on new, the other 20 and 20 on scales or theory, or sightreading.

I'm curious as to how you manage this given that you (for the past week anyway) are practicing 15-20 minutes per day. Do you actually break it down as 3/3/3/6 on a 15 minute day? Or do you focus on one thing per day in a five day rotation, taking two days for the new material? Or something else?

Christmas Music learned so far:
1. We Wish You a Merry Christmas
2. Angels We Have Heard on High
3. We Three Kings

My goal is 5 songs. Even though I'm a true beginner, I may try Christmas Canon, I love this piece. Next week we're working with eighth notes so I'll probably have Christmas songs with eighth notes to practice. Work, fun, work, work, fun!

You guessed it. The break down is for overall time for the week or month, not for each practice session. Another person might do three separate 20 minute practices each day for an hour a day, but the same idea applies. It is a rough guideline, not any kind of rule, that seems to have served me well in my nine months of practice time.

Sometimes people ask about how much time to spend on old repertoire or how much time to practice scales and arpeggios, or work on sight reading, and the answer for me has been about the same 20% of total practice time for each. It might go to 10% if there are other things a person wants to work on.

With only 40% of time for new material, progress will be slower than a person devoting 80% of their time to learning pieces. However, the 40/20/20/20 is more likely to give a beginner a solid base as compared to focusing on learning new pieces.

Teacher seems content to let me study Alfred's 2 on my own. Instead we're focussing on the 'easy piano' David Lanz book my recital piece is from. I can play Before the Last Leaf Falls, Cristofori's Dream, Leaves on the Seine, Return to the Heart, and this weekend added The Dragon's Daughter to the list. It took several weeks to 'get' the piece, but now I feel I can play it comfortably in a casual setting. Looking forward to tomorrow's lesson!

I wonder what to work on next. My new Christmas Eve book is coming later this week, so I'll need something else to play until then. I've been playing some of the other songs one-handed and think Madrona might be relatively easy. And then I came across Dreamer's Waltz, recalled I have the original sheet music and can't get it out of my head anymore! It's so beautiful! And probably too hard. Argh!

I have had the secondhand grand about six months. Frankly, I am happy to play anything from a weighted key keyboard to a Clavinova. It is humbling to play an acoustic grand. I keep it cloth covered and I never open the top except today because I have a cold and my hearing is impaired from the cold, so the thought it was an okay time to pull out all the stoppers. I discovered that if I gently play middle C or any key for that matter that if you put you other hand on the piano you can feel the vibrations. You can see that I don't know very much about pianos. Of course, as a beginner, I am very busy trying to play without mistakes, read the music and make my playing musical, so don't have a free hand to feel the vibrations usually. Usually I play about 60 beginner tunes without too many mistakes. Having a cold I had to settle for a lower standard. But in spite of my impaired hearing, I never missed hearing a mistake and would laugh when I made one because normally I would be displeased with my bad playing.

Toastie, we will be watching closely for those photos!

TallGuy...well, that was quite a post. I can understand not doing some chores in favour of playing the piano. That happens regularly here However I can see why your wife would be pretty ticked off with you for playing the piano when there are chores from 2005 still waiting to be done.

However there are some other significant differences too: I don't have kids, and my hubby has his own little "addiction" with computer simulators, so we're quite happy to do our own thing side-by-side.

I know that one of the reasons I don't tackle certain chores is that they seem overwhelming - I have been known to let them go until I don't know where to start. Then, generally, things come to a head and in a frenetic burst of energy I tackle them and voilà... I wonder why it took me so long to get to it. However not doing things that end up costing you money....well, that's rather self-sabatoging, isn't it?
Not to mention really, really ticking off your wife.
Your whole story of "sneaking off" to play piano just doesn't sound good to me - not good in terms of your communications with your wife and kids, not good with just being honest with yourself.

From what you've said it seems to me that piano in and of itself is not the problem.
Your wife would probably be irritated by any activity that kept you from doing some of those outstanding tasks!

From what you have said, it seems to me that you're very aware of all that needs to be done, and I would venture to suggest, since you gave us all the info, that if you undertook to find some balance between the things that really need to be done and piano playing, you'd find a lot more harmony in your home!

Sand Tiger, sorry to hear that the discomfort has been troubling you again.

I know what you mean about being able to play the pieces (Christmas songs) but not having them up to a level for sharing! I'm doing a lot better than last year, but it is all relative!

As for the 2 year framework for developing fluidity in sight-reading, of course that's an "in general" kind of comment. My teacher told me that at my second lesson, and as she really didn't know me at that point, I think she just wanted to be certain she was giving me something far enough away that I wouldn't be discouraged if I didn't see progress in a few months!
I don't mean to say that I can just sit down and read&play any piece -no..... but I'm certainly at a respectable level of fluidity and I'm seeing that my progress is moving faster now (And again, I am maybe a tad faster because of the high level of reading we did with the concert band in high school. Five years of playing pretty well every day, anything from Bach, to Beethoven, to Tchaichovsky, to Holst, quite an incredible range of music really! )

As for composing rather than working on reading - hey, to each his own. I've done some composing for guitar in the past, and even wrote one piece for piano (which I couldn't actually play --lol) but I like the idea of improving my reading and eye-hand coordination so that I can have fun with all the music that is out there just waiting to be played!

Allard - sounds like you are making some lovely progress! I personally think it is nice to have those "too hard" pieces out there in front of us, like a carrot, leading us on to bigger and better things! There are a lot of pieces that are too hard for me that I've been working on in little bites, working out the fingering and playing at slow speeds. Sometime over the next six months I hope to tackle 2 of them with my teacher and get them up to speed gradually!

Michael - that sounds like a wonderful experience. I've never just put my hand on the piano case while playing... I think I'll do that later today! I agree though, even with my little upright, the difference in the feelings that run through you when you are playing an acoustic compared to the digital... just amazing!

Yesterday I was practicing my scales and getting very irritated. My new teacher has me working on keeping my hands in a better position (I tend to keep my 4 and 5 fingers up in the air WAY too much), and he has me working on shifting my fingers more horizontally rather than lifting up and over. I'm going nuts trying to fix this - he easily convinced me of the long term benefits of doing this, with an eye to more complicated /faster pieces-- but I'm also feeling a bit crankly and cross and wonder my my first teacher never addresed this problem? grrrr.