About a year and a half ago, I bought a book called the Applause Book 1. It has some intermediate pieces that are crowd pleasers. When I bought it, I figured I should just go for it. I failed big time. I put the book away only playing 1 or 2 pieces from it. 2 weeks ago, I brought it out again. I can now play almost everything in the book. I guess it doesn't scare me much anymore. I just finished the Molto Vivace (etude for left hand) from Bartok's For Children in 5 days.

Everything seems less intimidating to me now. It went from, I'll never be able to play that to with a lot of work, I might be able to play that. Is this what it is like to improve?

Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you out there. You all have helped me so much. A nicer more intelligent group of people there never was.

Matt

Matt :

This is known as progress, growth and development.

It's a great feeling, isn't it?

Congratulations!

Regards,

Yes, I've had the same experience. I discovered that after a year of site-reading lessons with my instructor, I can play music from my old intermediate level books with relative ease. Still not perfect, but the pieces sound like they should and with very little stop and start.

It's a wonderful feeling, isn't it!?

i guess such experience happend to everyone. there're several times, when i picked up a piece i used to think it's impossible to play, i found it's no longer that impossible. i just started Chopin etude op.10.2, which i tried a few bars once and felt terribly difficult. but now, i've learned 1.5 pages of that just in a week, and mostly i could just slowly sight read through it. although playing this piece at tempo would still be extremely difficult to do, it still tells that how much i have improved... yeah, i feel great about it!

ah,the fruits of hard work! - well done and keep it up.

Congratulations