Week 2: First Steps
Week 2: First Steps
You’ve chosen your piece. Now the real work begins.
This week is all about getting into the music without worrying about perfection yet. First impressions matter. The way a piece feels under your hands, the sounds you’re drawn to, the passages that already feel natural (or completely confusing) are all part of the process.
This is the stage where pieces often feel the most fragile. Things are slow, uneven, and uncertain. That’s normal.
For this week, we’d love for you to share:
- Early practice clips
- First impressions of the piece
- Passages you’re struggling with
- Musical moments you already love
- Questions or discoveries from practice
A few ideas to focus on this week:
- Finding a comfortable tempo
- Experimenting with sound and tone
- Discovering patterns in the music
- Identifying one or two “problem spots”
- Practicing smaller sections instead of full run-throughs
Looking forward to hearing everyone’s first steps into the music.
73 replies
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Week 2 Recordings for:
- mm. 67-88, Start of B section (technically I start from mm. 63 because it made for a nicer lead in).
- mm. 156-end, Coda
I just made them both into a single video with a transition for easier viewing =) I also added PDFs below to show the sections if anyone wants to see the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UP5-h1q0Rk
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Eight of the happiest seconds of my life… Only two more stretch LH chords to hit.
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Here is my second video check-in for week 2: memory check for the first 1/2 of the piece (with a mistake or two and some memory stutters toward the end of this section). The tempo I've chosen for this recording is the tempo I'm aiming for by the end of the challenge for the entire piece, with an ultimate tempo (next month!) goal about 50% quicker. Combining advice from and I've found a RH motion that is efficient and allows my hand/arm to remain relaxed - a great combination. All in all, I'm happy with my progress, and I'm already much further along in this piece than I was last year.
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Friends, I feel bad about posting this, but this is all I have in terms of this week's horror show. The view is bad, only the left hand! but I think the audio is more important. You can see how chaotically I practice. And I did remove the parts with excessive repeating, for this is a horror show, not a tedium show, although I'm afraid it did end up being tedious nonetheless. I also removed small parts where I did obscene gestures that help me relax during practice.
Those with a keen eye will see that I use the middle pedal at some point. Sorry to disappoint, but this is not for sostenuto! I actually completely changed the mechanism of the middle pedal on my acoustic piano (on which I intend to record the "final" product), into a mechanism that lifts the hammer rest rail in order to bring all hammers closer to the strings to create a lighter sound, a la 4th pedal on a Fazioli F308! I can tell you more about this later. However you cannot hear this on this practice instrument. In fact neither the middle nor left pedal work on this electronic piano (a Kawai ES920). I put the pedals there just to practice the foot motion, a la aka the fastest feet on Tonebase.Oh and near the end a key of my Kawai stops functioning (something with the blue thingies inside), so I lost patience and briefly noodled a few notes from a certain new piece that I'm learning. Oh well. You have been warned!
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Working through Heartland a few bars at a time. Here are bars 49 to 76.
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Here's my week 2 post. Now I think it's time to step up! Goal for next week will be to learn the whole thing, so the last week can be mainly about nailing those fast passages, and then hopefully we get something presentable for the watch party.
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Here is a run through of the Waltz in E major by Moszkowski. I find it q challenge to play through the entire piece due to the technical challenges and also the musical requirements. This week I am working on the entire piece as well as drilling smaller sections.
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This week, I practised the LH jumps, one hand only, to get more used to the movement patterns. I also did slow, staccato, metronomic practice on other tough passages outside of the Barcarolle. This was the biggest challenge for me — dividing my time between different priorities both including and outside of the Barcarolle!
Something interesting — I wasn't able to stay exactly on the metronomic beat 100% of the time, and did not realize how and where exactly until when I watched the video! It was hard to self-diagnose while playing.
Here are two short practice videos from this week.
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In Week 2, I was able to very roughly learn the notes/memorize until the coda. I also tried to polish week 1’s work. Here is a short video of m22-m39.