Beautiful

Over the past week, I have been working on several pieces from the Alfred’s book. I tried out 10 different pieces, and was able to complete 9 of them. And among them, I found pieces which I really like. Maybe one day I will learn the full versions of them.

Let’s listen to some of the pieces.

Joy to the World is obviously very well known to almost everyone. This piece was actually not that easy for me. Getting the timing right was important and I was finding it hard to count and play. Which is why I have played it at a tempo lower than what I would have liked. I already know how to play scales and hence it was a bit easier.

On Top of Old Smoky sounds very nice to me. I have a general liking for pieces which have broken chords on the left hand and by now I have played several such pieces. Hence learning this one was simple and didn’t take much time.

Now this is the one that I find the best out of the lot. As someone who likes flowing music a lot, with notes connected, I find this piece specially beautiful because it is exact opposite of those things but sounds very exciting. It’s also incredibly fun to play this one. I did not find any problems learning this one though. Was able to get it down in a day maybe.

And finally, Why I Am Blue. What a great piece. Well, except the ending. When I first played this one, I played it with a straight rhythm. But then I listened to a couple of recordings online and found that while some people did play it with a straight rhythm, others played it with a swing rhythm because it is a blues piece. It sounded much better to me with the swing rhythm so I went ahead with that. But it made counting impossible for me, so I just played without counting and I think it came out fine.

Now I am getting into the difficult category of pieces in this book. I spent 5 minutes on the next piece just to get a feel of it and it seems quite difficult to me. I just hope that pieces that come now in the book sound as nice as these ones.