Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Achievement of the week - what got you excited?

FarmGirl..... Congratulations! Sounds like you had a great week.

I have my first two pieces memorized. Had my best run through of each this morning. Got excited that the 2nd piece seemed much easier to learn than the first. Let's see how the next one goes.

Well done Farmgirl what an achievement, that must feel pretty good

That's awesome Jaymes!

Farmgirl, we all knew you would thrive at someplace like Summerkeys. I really admire the way you always seem to be putting yourself in just the right spot to push your piano skills to the max. Thanks for the continued inspiration.

JimF, you are very kind. SummerKeys seem to bring out everyone's music potential. Now my hubby is seriously thinking about picking up violin! I think a week of hungong around with the string players made him think about it. They kindly adopted me into their group and invited us to their hime parties and jamming sessions. It would be great if we could go together. We could have a piano party then.

Jaymes and Jessiebear, welcome to the AOTW tribe.

Farmgirl, I enjoyed reading your Summerkeys updates on the other thread. Usually I am amped up after performing. My crash tends to occur the next day, and the next few days, because of the vast energy expended rehearsing and then performing.

Week 77: I start on some new projects. I learn about the Alberti bass pattern, from a tutorial on how to play the pop song, Come Sail Away by Styx. The pattern is left hand arpeggio: 1 5 3 5 (low note, high note, middle, high) and then repeat. Composer Domenico Alberti [1710-1740 Italy] used the pattern so much, that it is named for him. The most famous occurrence is in the beginning of Mozart's Piano Sonata K545.

I print out an arrangement of Bill Withers, Ain't No Sunshine [when she is gone]. As is often the case, I don't care for the arrangement and will likely do my own, if I want to learn the song. The arranging tends to more than triple the time to learn the song. Triple of what most already think is a snail's pace of learning. That said, my songwriting is what drives me, and arranging is an excellent way to get better at writing my own music, so it is not time wasted.

I spend some time on much neglected scale work. My left hand scale fingering can be all over the place, so I find some fingering charts online and print a few out. I am not a fan of learning all the scales. The one or two for the songs I am working on is plenty. More than that and I get confused.

Have a good week everyone.

Sand tiger

Thanks for your comment. I admire you and FOYD folks. Probably it's a good thing to keep track of the practice. My Japanese pianist friend does it on his blog. He is an excellent pianist. I am yet to bring myself to that. I'm a bit afraid of organization.

Got my first DP.
Clavinova CLP-430.
I'm very happy, I couldn't live longer with semi-weighted keys, makeshift music stand, low chair, cheap speakers, booting the computer to have decent sound.
I hope this new instrument will make me learn faster.

FarmGirl, can you share the link to your friend's practice blog? I also started a blog and am curious to see what others are doing.

My achievement of the week is that I memorized the coda of Chopin's Ballade No. 1. It's... clunky, but at least now I'm not constantly referring to the score while practicing. Baby steps, right?

I also put together some wireframes with this music scores website I've been thinking about. It started as something to help me keep track of my practicing, but after talking to some of my music friends, it might turn into a tool others find useful. (If anybody is curious, I put together a questionnaire to gather feedback/explain the site: http://musical.neuralfirings.com/scoresprojectresearch/)

Neuralfirings... not sure if you've posted to AOTW yet or not, but "welcome" regardless.

Unfortunately your link above goes directly to your survey, so I wonder if people will take the time to search for the context of your idea. I hope they do, but if not, I'm linking to what I think is pure genius here. If you can pull off the technical aspects, and get a big enough body of users, I think it would be a fantastic (and fun) resource to share annotations with others.

Re: the score scrolling aspect, check out AirTurn.

Farmgirl. What good news about your husband. When I first met my wife we lived with some musical roommates in Manhattan, one of whom played cello for a symphony orchestra and chamber groups. It was awesome hearing her practice all the time...although I guess listening to a beginner would be more challenging..like what my poor wife has to put up with.

@aTallGuyNH -- thanks for the recommendation. AirTurn looks like a cool product. I think I'll start with the tapping on the iPad, though. It's easier to implement and still an improvement from page turning (those sticky pages!!).

Here's a link to the mockups without having to go through the survey: http://musical.neuralfirings.com/2013/09/notable-scores-wireframes-and-user-survey/

The main thing I need to figure out right now is
1) would people use this (the more people find this helpful, the higher priority it gets on my "side projects" list)
2) which features people would find useful (helps me prioritize all the different features)

I think I'll still do this regardless. It'll help me keep track of my notes while playing piano and make asking questions on Piano World less painful (screenshot pdf, crop, upload, copy link to post..)

AOTW... Wow, haven't had one of these in a loooooong time!

I "fell off the wagon" re: staying away from Clair de Lune. After just a few hours of very slow practice, I have most of it (the portion I had learned previously, which is about half) back in my fingers. Not up to speed, and not memorized, but much further along than I would have expected given steering clear for ~6 months.

It felt good to be playing something where I can actually put something of myself into it.

If I'm not mistaken its about the time Cheryl come back from her holiday. Missed you.

@aTallGuyNH - Did you see the Google Doodle for Claire de Lune a few weeks ago? They were celebrate Debussy's birthday!

http://www.google.com/doodles/claude-debussys-151st-birthday

aTallGuyNH,
LOL, Your falling off the CDL wagon had me laughing. I worked on CDL when in self-teaching mode all through the Fall of 2009 (using Hugh Sung's CDL thread). When I got my first teacher in January 2010 her first request was that I drop it. I've been on the wagon ever since I don't know when I'll be ready to go back to it, but I do feel a lot closer to that point than I was 3 1/2 years ago. And I'm so glad I didn't make a recording back then.....virtually certain I would find it cringe-worthy today no matter what I thought of it back then.

Cheryl, if you are back from Holiday, its not a moment too soon. We have been lazy and the AOTW wallowed on page 2 for several days. Welcome back.

My AOTW was coming up with a base arpeggio pattern to use playing Stella by Starlight from a fakebook and then playing it ok at yesterday's lesson. I got some good tips from her for focusing my practice on both the Puccini and Mozart pieces. She said she had been thinking she'd been assigning me too many "big" pieces and that maybe I was becoming frustrated practicing the same things for weeks on end. So we are going to have some shorter projects coming up in the future, things I might be able to tackle in a few weeks instead of months. Don't really know that I've been frustrated, but I'll welcome the change of pace. She also agrees that I should keep developing a "repertoire" of completed pieces that I can play for enjoyment, so we'll be reviving some things from the past - this week I'm going to start in on bringing back Misty, which I haven't really touched for about two years.

No offense intended to everyone else, but it does feel a little like there is a hole in the middle of AOTW without Cheryl around, and with Sara taking a break too.


Well, you're a better man than I to stay on the wagon. I'm way off now, although I'm planning to re-shelve it in fairly short order -- probably after Boston Street Pianos is done, about a month from now.

In the interim, I'm getting a nice glow from how quickly it is coming back. However, I did get a nice splash of cold water today when I tried to run through the portions that I know at speed, but it was still a mess all around.

I did record the first 18 bars back in December, which is on my YouTube channel. I think the most cringe inducing part is the piano being out of tune, hopefully the performance aspects were OK:
[video:youtube]dR6gezYWBXs[/video]

I just gave it a listen though, and the rhythm was not very good -- I think I have it better now.

If I ever meet Hugh Sung in person, I will be mightily tempted to box his ears for leading so many innocent lambs astray.

His "hey, anyone can do it, just give it a try" shtick reminds me of the classic 80's "It'll make you feel good... feel good... feel good..." anti-drug PSA.

(Hugh, if you ever read this... I just mean it in good fun... and... can you start a series on Chopin Concerto #1?)

AOTD: Listened to Chopin Concerto #1 (Kissin) and was able to successfully follow along with the score (mostly). Only got off by a few measures a couple times, but was able to catch up/slow down and get back on track quickly. Definitely not something that I would have been able to do 6 months ago.

Also, it was fun to see/hear intervals and have the visual and auditory inputs make sense together -- i.e. ear training is making a difference in my music appreciation and reading skills, even if I'm not doing particularly well at the ear training exercises themselves.

Here is the video.


PS: The preview is not working... sorry.

Just wanted to drop in this morning and say "hi". Playing the Grieg pieces so they sound musical to me is my achievement this week...now if I can record one that captures that this weekend. My work life is super busy this fall and finding any practice time has been tough but I've been up at 4 to squeeze some in before heading out to the highway. I've been fairly ambitious working on several pieces at the same time. Some (like the Debussy Arabesque) are a measure or two at a time. My teacher has assigned us all some Beethoven for our next piano sharing. I've got a movement (maybe two) from #14 Sonata in E Major. Three lines so far. Any mountain can be climbed a step at a time.