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You did a bang up job Whizbang. Thank you for your efforts. I cant wait till the next one.

I will take your advice for when I try to polish up that piece later (now I put it on the shelf, it sort of over stayed its welcome). I got to work on my thirds technique or lack thereof, and work out better fingering. I always think that fingering for thirds should be something complicated , but as you have stated (and my mom said the same thing) the fingering is most usually just a plain old 13,24,35 and so forth


Accomplishment of the week..well nothing really. Other than I feel free now to try other stuff. I have been wanting to pick up rondo alla turca Mozart again so Im playing through that now.

Yup...those airport bars look attractive after a while.
You never did actually input anything on Zimmerman and Elite Syncopations. I was wondering more about that. Really really like how he did that. I'm guessing Zimmerman is supposed to have been one of the best players of Joplin?

Actually my AOTW also concerns that recital. It appears to me that I have been successful in playing the way I've been talking. In other words. Demonstrated that I not only talk the talk. But I walk the walk. No more people out there doubting what I say about making music and mistakes don't matter. I do admit though. I had the last few bars down pat. Then fell apart with the recorder. It was this beautiful "RIT" that got softer. I never did write down how I played it exactly. Just did it by feel and it was awesome. Then...recorded it a bunch of times and couldn't get the feeling right for the timing. Doh! At least I succeeded to others in walking my talk.

EDIT: I forgot to thank Whizbang....again for the recital. Doing that did a whole lot for me. I don't know what it is about Joplin. The rhythm? Syncopations? Something appealed to my nervous system to pull me through that adaptation. Did a ton to help me break through playing both hands. Was having a ton of trouble getting them to both play together. Then, this did it.

Ron,

Congratulations on participating in your first recital. That is a major achievement.

Congrats Ron!
My AOTW:
Started using the pedal (As part of lessons, did some pedaling on my own but don't know whether that made very much sense ;)). I'm gonna spend a lot of attention to dynamics, accents and so on in the time to come according to my teacher. YEAH! (That's the part I enjoy the most though it's perhaps also the most difficult).

Thanks JimF and wimpiano... Gee...that is quite a cake.

what excited me was....nah, I agree

Two AOTW's this time:

(1) Got a thumbs up on my pedaling. The first week re-doing the pedaling wasn't good, but the second time I finally got it. Phew! My teacher is getting pickier, and this is good.

(2) I signed up for summer and fall semester (community college) piano lessons. The teacher I have now doesn't give lessons in the summer, so I signed up with the head honcho for summer lessons. Should be interesting (gulp).

Good lesson this week (after several weeks off for a break). The Tchaikovsky (Winter morning) requires more work with pedaling. It is one of those deceptively simple looking pieces with many fine points to make it work. So..AOTW getting the notes to flow correctly. AOTW for the next two weeks...pedaling and more expression of the meanings. I'm with you Stubbie and Wimpiano on focus on pedaling and music quality.

Jim F...LOVE that cake. I want one...can't think of an occasion but want one.

Awesome Whizbang. applause! The Joplin recital was great.

WiseBluff, thumbs up on a good lesson, and many more to come! "Deceptively simple [pieces] with many fine points..." nails it.

I can't say yet whether my pedaling is fixed for good, but I practiced pedaling on several other pieces to try to generalize my technique. But--my teacher reassigned the piece for my next lesson--I need to work on expression. On physical movement. It feels awkward and showy to me, frankly, but I'm trying to take to heart what Andy Platt said his teacher told him, "Too much movement is next year's problem." (If it wasn't Andy and that's not the quote, well, I like it anyway.)

Fortunately WiseBuff this is the AOTW thread. We don't need any reason better than having a good lesson to deserve some cake!!!

Ah Jim. What a perfect cake!! We're excited we got to the NCAA Tourney so this cake does have an occasion. Maybe next year we'll make it past the first round. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

My other team is Division II # 1 MSU Denver Roadrunners (I teach there--obviously not piano). Next game Mar 26.

Snowing here...great afternoon to sit at the piano. I'm really playing from my repertoire list...better each time.

Week 106: a day of cold air in a conference room has my left hand complaining. So it is a light week on the Casio PX150. I find a nice motif for my new piece. [A motif or motive is a distinct musical figure that is subsequently altered, repeated, or sequenced throughout a piece or section of a piece of music.] It isn't all that easy to play, but that will likely come after another 100 hours or so of working on the new composition.

I just created a thread with several pictures from our piano party that has just happened.

I'm really awful at sight reading, even very simple pieces. So I decided I had to try my best to sight read something every day. It turned out I sight-read 10 minutes 3-4 times per week. Now, after 6 months I realized I'm better! Well, I'm less awful, but still I consider it an achievement, and the demonstration the it takes time but your work is never wasted.
One day I need to try myself with ear-training and singing, maybe when I'll be retired (about 25 years from now )or when the children will be grown up.

Well, my achievement was to play in front of folks without panicking or drawing a blank

Mind you....could I have been in a more supportive environment than playing in front of FarmGirl and SwissMS???? I ask you?

I am exactly the same, but about 5.5 months behind you! Hopefully in 6 mths time I too will be seeing the benefits!

So my main AOTW this week is that the Bach Invention #8 has all come together to the extent that now I'd consider it at the "polishing" stage. I can play the whole thing through from memory (the "from memory" bit is an accidental bad habit with me rather than an achievement). There are always some errors, and some sections are more error prone than others, so they definitely still need work. The whole thing needs to speed up a lot, and it's very obvious where the sticking points to tempo increases are, so again those areas especially need work. I'm doing a reasonable amount of HS work which is definitely helping - it's a bit of a struggle as I don't really like playing HS once I have HT going ok.
But despite that long catelogue of things that are wrong, it's really made a big jump forward :-)

I've parked the Mozart Alla Turca a bit, as my wrist was bothering me and the octave sections were bothering it. Wrist issue not caused by piano, and not aggravated by most playing, luckily, but the tension I was feeling from having my hand at full stretch for extended sections was definitely problematic. I'll get back to it when the time is right.

It seems at the moment that I can properly work on 2 pieces at a time - one is not enough, but more than 2 and I'm spread too thin. I can swap the pieces around from week to week, and another piece or two might get a bit of attention, but the right level in any given week is 2. This is a useful insight for me because I always try to bite off more than I can chew!
So as Mozart was taking a back seat this week, Einaudi's Nefeli was out for polishing - working on the areas where I tend to make errors or generally lack precision, speeding it up, working on dynamics, adding pedalling, and generally trying to make it sound more "Einaudi-ish" - relistening to his version only serves to emphasise how far from it my version is, but I'll just have to live with that.

Time to figure out what to work on next! I'm torn between Chopin, more Bach or another modern piece suggested by my teacher (in a vaguely similar vein to the one I did in the last ABF recital). My head says Chopin, as I haven't worked on anything of that style since returning to the piano last year (or ever, really), so it's good development. But my heart might be saying Bach as I'm enjoying this one so much.

torquenale
"maybe when I'll be retired (about 25 years from now frown )or when the children will be grown up."

Retirement comes round quicker than you think! And when it does, life gets better; it also gets worse . . .
And this should be my 3000th posting . . .so I`ll end my verse!

3000 in 18 months? What am I turning into???

This week I made up my very first little song. It's very very simple, with the right hand just doing some patterns going up and down the G Maj scale, with the left hand doing the four major chords in G.
It's very simplistic, but I like the sound of it and am proud of it because when I started I could barely put together a scale, let alone a little song.

This week I accidentally achieved something by messing up!

I have been learning a new piece, using youtube material, then upon getting my hands on a copy of the sheet music for said piece, found the notes on the actual sheet music to be different to those from the youtube tutorials!

So I'm relearning a large chunk of what I had previously done, with the added bonus of my hands desprately wanting to go off & play the youtube material because I had learned the music well enough for my hands to just play it by themselves.

What I feel I achieved? Learned from a mistake that is being a pain to undo. From now on I will double check what I'm learning is EXACTLY what I want to play. It's a small achievement I know, but one none the less!

Don't beat yourself up over this! If it was a "classical" piece, it's a good idea to know the original version (though many of us take no shame in entertaining an audience with "easy" versions of a great melody). If it's a song, many versions may be equally valid.