One Tough Cookie

Few days back I started working on the piece Little Brown Jug from the Alfred’s book. The piece seemed a bit difficult initially, mostly because of the 6th intervals that had to be played. Since the piece is in key of F major, that meant that one black key was involved too. But as I slowly started to count and play things got easier and I was soon able to play the first half.

I didn’t particularly like the piece though. So I decided to listen to some recording of it and I found that it had to be played much faster than I was playing and at that tempo the piece sounded beautiful. So I learnt the second half quickly and started to play the piece faster. And while it was thoroughly enjoyable to play it fast, it got that much harder to play it right. And I can never count fast so the timing went for a toss. Its even tougher because the entire piece has to be repeated and getting the whole thing correct twice in a row is really hard.

So when I sat down to record it about an hour back, it was a continuous sequence of me being able to play it right once but never being able to play it right twice. And I would get confused a lot about where I was in the piece because there is a lot of repetition among all the lines except that the ending measure of the lines are a bit different. So anyways, this is what I could put together in the end.

I know I haven’t played it correctly. But to do that, I need to count and I am just not able to count fast and play at the same time. I don’t know how to fix that either. Maybe I will turn on the metronome and try again. But for now, this is what it is.