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

Now this one is monumental, huge, astounding, magnificent....................












I completed the Primer level of Piano Adventures ( yep, the kid's version)

Congrats to everyone for achievements big and small.

Well done Andy- is this going to be a regular thing? Dulcetta- cool you've finished your book- which one next?

Nice keyboard and lamps Maple!

Dulcetta, it is monumental huge, astounding, magnificent........I know how you feel in your achievement or at least I will when I actually finish one book I start, lol.

Well done, the fundamental stuff is so important, you can only build from there. What's next are you going to continue with Piano Adventures?

I know every little step counts on the journey, and I want to travel by bicycle not airplane, but it does feel kind of funny finishing a book designed for 6 year olds, and then posting about it on the internet lol.
I am awaiting delivery of Level 1 PA books and some Keith Snell theory, scale practice and repertoire books too.
Still focusing on learning scales, chords and arpeggios though, but need something to play once my fingers are warmed up lol.

On a serious note I think the easy books are good for sightreading and interval recognition though.

100% with you there

I still use my early books for reading practice.

My AOTW is that I read & played the melody part of Return to Sorento. I knew the song but had never seen a score for it. It may turn out to be one I'll buff up.

My AOTW is that I took the plunge and ordered Alfred's all in one adult course 2 and 3, and a bunch of sight reading books. I've decided to spend some time every day going through these books. I've had fun learning hard repertoire, but if I'm ever going to become a real musician, I have to be able to read and understand music, and those are skills acquired through study and practice. And practice I WILL

+1
Sam, I think it takes courage and humility to go back to basic. Good for you. I think it's the right thing to do. You may not need to go back to very basic but would be good to be exposed to many different composers. Especially classical composers are good for building and fortifying technique. I used to hate to play those when I was younger. There is no rubato, mostly strictly on time and those pieces seem to expose my lack of technique. Especially Mozart. Lots of scale like patterns, 4 notes runs and etc. looks deceptively easy. But I guess because of the simplicity, it sounded really bad when my scales were not even. With your innate sense of extremely fine musicianship I think this effort will take you to yet another hight. Looking forward to hearing you play your next piece.

Writing this at JFK again. Getting on the plane soon bound for home at 6:30AM so that I can make a noon meeting in my Arizona office. I tried practice on my company's decorative and out of tune but got escorted out by 2 securities. I was livid. My co-workers and my boss were totally amused. Oh yeah they were notified. "maybe they thought you are a piano bomber". It sucks.

Yup! Rubato has its place, but can also be an excuse for playing the hard bits slower :-) Whatever notes you decide to play, at whatever speed, control is the aim.

Computer sequencer programs, coupled to a MIDI keyboard, were a great learning tool for me. Play a simple scale, fluently and evenly, to the click. Then look on screen to see what you ACTUALLY played! It can be frightening.

OK, so I've decided that I need to do a scheduled follow-up on this thread twice a week from now on (Wednesdays, Saturdays) in order to not get drowned in responses, and then feel like I have to clear an entire Saturday morning in order to be able to give every post the attention I'd like to give it.

Also, minor AOTW: I finished my Grieg piece. My teacher assigned it to me two weeks ago, and I felt like it was simple enough that I should have been able to finish it in one week. I didn't, but now I have. And that feels like something of an achievement, because I haven't finished anything in less than three weeks since the first three pieces my teacher assigned to me.



A "pretty well" rating of your own performance at the retirement home, despite the shakes, right on the heels of an earlier "pretty well" rating of your performance at church a while ago. Seems to me you are really getting the hang of this playing in public thing. Way to go!



Congratulations on your restraint . And your recording was quite enjoyable to listen to, though now that I think about it, I may have forgotten to say so on the Ecco Fatto thread. Will need to fix that right after I finish this.



... and being able to look at life that way is an achievement many times bigger and more important than anything related to playing the piano. It's so much easier to find happiness in life when material things are of little consequence. So, good for you!



And this is commitment! I'm sure you must have been tired when you returned from your trip. But you played anyway. Nice.



Yeah, I've been noticing this, too. I think I've mentioned this before, but I started having intermittent bouts of blindness this summer, and they seem to get worse with stress. So I have to figure out ways to play my recital pieces without looking at my hands at all. At first, I spent a lot of time looking for ways to physically 'measure' distances as I played. But after a while, I figured out that almost all jumps will eventually become part of muscle memory if I practice them enough times. So I'm sure that realising you can 'trust your jumps' will help you in many pieces yet to come, which makes this a major achievement, indeed.



Well, sometimes they do, yeah. It's good that you've experienced this 'first-hand' now, but I'm sure you actually already knew this. People here can't seem to stop blabbing about the "practice - assimilation" loop, anyway . I'm happy for you about the good lesson.



Don't try to play that down just because the book was originally written for kids! If I am not mistaken, you are still teacher-less, and yet you seem to be making steady, measurable progress. That is not something to feel 'funny' about just because of the method book you happen to have chosen to tackle. It is something to be proud of.



Making progress on the sight-reading front, it seems. Good for you!



What she said, Sam. I admire your humility and determination in going back to basics, after all you've already accomplished *without* those basics.

I had one of those great lessons, nothing specific - just felt really right and we hit on some good points.

I'm putting the Chopin Nocturne on the back burner for a while. My teacher wants me to keep it going a little longer to improve some things but it's mostly at a point where my skills need to improve to make it much better which will take some more years.

I'm going to do another sonatina before we move onto simpler Beethoven sonatas. I picked Clementi's Opus 36 no 2 in G major. It's not complicated so I'll see how quickly I can progress and get it into a nice shape.

And I signed up for the Grieg recital - "A popular melody". Had a play through last night. There are some tricky little rhythmic bits and some harmonic shifts that will need careful thought to get it to work right.

But the real AotW was submitting the Nocturne to the ABF "Beginners and Beyond" recital. Woo-hoo!

Thank you FarmGirl. Even though my exposure to classical is limited. I have always known that is where the real training is. Nice to hear someone put it in a little different way. I'll need to take another look at Mozart.

Maybe you should change your name here to: PianoBomber. Maybe next time you go back there. That piano might be in tune. And they won't have to depend on security to cover up it's lack of maintenance. I have an image in my mind of the next time you go back. "Oh no...get the piano tuner in here."

All right, scratch the above. My Grieg piece may or may not, in fact, be finished. More news on that Friday after my lesson.

However, I did have a breakthrough of sorts, today.

I haven't been practicing correctly. My strategy thus far has been to stumble through my pieces until I have them, more or less, under my fingers, and then play through them again and again until they sound vaguely good enough that I won't be embarrassed playing them in front of my teacher.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Of course, I knew that. But I was having fun, and I was still learning new stuff on a fairly regular basis, so the motivation wasn't really there to do something about it.

Today, though, I was trying to record a piece for the May piano bar and, try as I might, I could *not*, for the life of me, get an error-free (or even nearly error-free) recording of it. This is a piece that *I* thought I was done with a week ago!

So, I played it more slowly. And when I still couldn't do it without flubbing here and there, I played it even more slowly than that. And when I still couldn't do it without flubbing here and there, well ... you get the idea.

The metronome marking on the score for this piece is 184 BPM. I had gotten it up to 120 ... or so I thought. I ended up having to set my metronome at 60 BPM before I could get a really clean play-through. And then I slowed it down even more, to 55 BPM, and kept playing until I could do five clean play-throughs (yes, of the entire piece) in a row. I stopped here and there to isolate a few troublesome measures and forced myself to *actually* do five clean play-throughs of those, too.

The AOTW is not in the fact that I did this. I should have been doing it all along. It's in the realisation that I've been using the metronome in a non-productive way. To me, a metronome marking is a goal to strive for. And so, from time to time, I've been trying to play to the metronome, set at the tempo marked on the score, to see "if I can do it yet".

What I realised today is that I shouldn't be using the metronome to see how fast I can go. I should be using it to keep myself from going too fast, too soon.

My teacher has been trying to tell me this from day one. The metronome marking is not the point, she said, and I thought, all right, and I'm going to try anyway. But she's right, of course (she usually is). The metronome marking is not the point, because once a piece is technically *really* secure, speed becomes trivial to add.

It's a shame it took me so long to realise, but hey, it wouldn't be an AOTW if it didn't take some doing to get to it, right?

dynamobt -- Hi neighbor! Well, it's a week old now, but congrats on your Ecco Fatto post. It was quite a bit better than I think you thought it was (if that makes sense). I believe you are really going to soar with the focus you are now giving to the piano.

Teodor -- Wow... that's pretty amazing. That piece is gorgeous, I can see how you could be transported by it in such a way. One has to have the technical skill though to be able to be so far removed from having to even think about playing per se -- and you've gotten to reap the rewards of all the labor that gets you to that point. Excellent!

earlofmar -- Congrats on a good week after having a lousy week. Always a good thing.

SandTiger -- Good for you on having the fortitude to ditch some pieces. I know that can be difficult to do.

rnaple -- It's funny, for the longest time I thought your name as "maple" as in "syrup". There is something about the way the lower case "rn" renders that make it very difficult to see the split between the two letters. Anyway, now that this is cleared up... the Kawai looks great, especially with those lights there -- classy.

I noticed you have The Piano Handbook... I have it as well, but haven't used it all that much. Too many dangling shiny distractions. How do you like it? BTW -- I've been out your way a couple times, it's a beautiful area of the country.

Dulcetta -- it's a worthy accomplishment, truly. A first step amongst many more, and a solid foundation.

Cheryl -- I admire your dedication!

Exalted Wombat -- I am so with you... rubato is my crutch.

RagDoll -- You had never posted a recording before? What?!?! Really? It's so funny... somehow if I read enough of people writing on AOTW and I become convinced that I've actually heard them play. If you had asked me to bet on it, I would have given very long odds that you had participated in the recitals previously. I had no idea! Anyway, good for you on taking that step. That David Jensen story was priceless too... I'll try to remember to mention it to my tuner on Friday.


+1 to FarmGirl's +1... I'm impressed Sam. That does take same serious humility given your demonstrated capabilities.


LOL... I want to see what this looks like... I can't quite imagine it.

I wonder about all these places that have pianos just for show... could there be a market out there for pianos that have most of the essentials left out since nobody is ever going to play the thing anyway? Couldn't a lot of money be saved by having the keys, strings, and harp all there, but leaving out the sound board and the action? Who would notice anyway? Right?


I've learned this, and forgotten it, and re-learned it... over and over again... sometimes all in one day. I'd say I forget it about 90% of the time. <sigh>

Congrats on continuing to grapple with this as an AOTW. And also for continuing to work on Moonlight Sonata. I'm looking forward to your recital submission this time as much as I was looking forward to FarmGirl's Brahms Intermezzo last time (which is to say... I'm looking forward to it a lot!!)

My AOTWs...

I was perusing "easy" piano music and was reading Mozart's Sonata in C, K545. I didn't actually know what I was reading though... i.e. I'm familiar with the piece (virtually anyone would be who has had even minimal exposure to classical music -- look it up and you'll see, or rather hear what I mean) but I didn't know it's name.

So, I'm reading along, trying to imagine the music (in my head) just by reading the notes, when after a couple dozen measures I realized that I actually recognized the music in my head! Really? Did I have it right? Went to YouTube... yep, I was actually reading music off a page, away from an instrument, in a meaningful way. Crazy! I would not have been able to do that six months ago.

I'm continuing to (unofficially) work on New York State of Mind. It's incredibly addictive... there is a D9 chord in the 21st and 24th bars that is just enormous -- it takes me somewhere close to what Teodor described, just for a moment.

Still working on Song #2 for my wife... slow going. It's pretty plain and stark, with fairly rigid timing, so very easy to notice mistakes. I may have to burn my New York State of Mind sheet music -- it's just too tempting to spend time on it.

That's fantastic!! I feel like I'll never get to that point. I'd love to be able to look at a piece of music and hear it, but right now it's just a dream. Have you done anything specific to hone that skill?

Looks like a nice setup. Love the lamps. They complete the atmosphere.

Looking forward to hearing this one!

Ha ha! "We won't prosecute you this time, Ma'am. But don't let it happen again!"

Spent an hour working on a line of Tchaikovsky's 1st piano concerto, I think I'm starting to get the hang of where things are supposed to go. Yay progress! .... ;_;

I'm surprised everybody keeps mentioning those lamps. They are just inexpensive ones from Family Dollar. The keyboard is wonderful.

The Piano Handbook. One could actually base their piano learning on it. It is a very good book on piano. I'm using it, Alfred's, and others for my learning. I go over the same thing in different books to learn well. When I finish up with Alfred's 1. My teacher has a program that uses three books. I doubt I will stop referring to the Piano Handbook at that time.