Slipping

I have been slipping. I wanted to complete two pieces a day, at least initially, when the difficulty level is low. But for the last couple of days I have been busy recording and publishing the earlier pieces. So my channel now has recordings of first 25 exercises from Michael Aaron’s Piano Course Grade I book. Though this has meant that I have hardly practiced any new exercises. So I am right where I was last weekend.

I need to become regular. Learn a piece in the morning. Learn another in the evening, record them at night and publish them along with a post here on HowILearntPiano.

My next class in on coming Saturday. I have 3 days until that class. If I can learn 2 pieces a day, I would have already completed half of my book. Of course, that’s the easier half. The other half would probably take much longer to learn.

The last couple of exercises introduced eighth notes. Playing eighth notes is not a problem as such, except that the counting changes. So instead of counting 1–2–3–4, now I count 1-n-2-n-3-n-4-n. At low tempo this is fine. At 60bps, I am able to do this quite easily. But as I get to 90bps, I am not able to maintain the tempo. One of the reasons is that my counting speeds up or slows down depending on whether the measure has a lots of notes or few notes to play. That is something that I need to correct. Basically my brain right now associates counting with playing. I need to dissociate them as two independent activities. Only then I can count at a steady pace, while playing any piece. Counting out loud again seems to help.

Since I recorded 25 exercises till now, I noticed a lot many faults in my playing. I have not tried to perfect the pieces yet. Instead I have uploaded them as they sound today. One of the problems is that I am not playing loud enough. This probably has to do with finger strength. Maybe this is where books like Hanon come in handy. The other problem is that all fingers are not playing the notes with equal intensity. Hence some notes are too loud while others are too soft. And then finally, as mentioned above, while playing pieces which have eighth notes at 90bps tempo, my timing goes off. Over the next few weeks, I will try to overcome these shortcomings. If I am making progress, then it should show up in my recordings.

Hopefully, I will have two new recordings to publish here tomorrow.