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.
122 replies
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This is week 2 practice: Chopin prelude op.28/13 in F# major bar 24-28.
This prelude has six #s, and accidentals shift within a bar some places. I need to remember those.
From bar 21, Chopin’s pedaling indicates left hand sounds like violin playing pizzicato (new word learned: Googled the terminology, i.e. plucking).
My recording sounds horrible when pedal is not used at all, so I need to use some pedal. -
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.
Mouvement mm. 63-88 Mouvement mm. 156 - end
Edit: Realized from everyone else's posts that you can imbed the video!
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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!