Roy's Practice Diary
I have found the diary in the drop-down lists - at last! I have written my diary in Excel - attached, as this allows me to copy in blocks each month.
My format is quite standard: one piece of old music, one piece of newer music, a study [or several small studies] and scales and arpeggios.
My aim is to practise for around two hours per day, broken up into half hours, and to change my pieces every six weeks. I was aiming to practise more than this each day when I joined Tonebase in September, as I thought I had retired, again. It was the fourth attempt.
However, about a month later I was offered a really interesting job in flood alleviation, so retirement has gone on hold again. However, I am WAH [working at home] because of COVID-19 office strategy. There's an upside to this as I have two pianos in my 'office' - one acoustic and one electric and I use my practice as a rest from the computer screen. We work flexible hours so I just do a longer day. We're not going anywhere far these days.
I was practising previously the scales and arpeggios of the keys of the pieces that I was learning, but I have now decided to work on all of the scales because they have been so neglected over the years. I am not practising enough hours to do them all each day so I have divided up the scales - major and harmonic minors so that I cover all of them in a four week period; hence the use of Excel so that I can copy and paste those four weeks into future diaries.
I am practising broken chords on a programme that covers six weeks. My plan is to introduce arpeggios into the four-week timescale when the scales have settled down after the first six weeks of this programme.
Thanks to Dominic for his session on structuring one's practice, I am now playing the scales hands together and have started a Bach Fugue, as Asiya said practise each voice separately, not just separate hands! Dominic said tackle something we find difficult at the start of the practice day, so I start with Back usually as so many people do and now I don't leave scales until the end of my practice but bring them in before I get tired, so hands together is far less of a problem. Derrr!!
All the Best!
Roy
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Roy James-Pike
This is all Excellent! Thanks for being the first person to kick off the practice diaries!! Looking forward to following your progress!
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This sounds great! I can't wait to hear you perform sometime. Best of luck!
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Brother Will Green Hello Brother Will. Thanks for your comment. I have only just seen this so apologies for the delay in responding. I am just about to put up my second month's diary, which is how I saw that there were 'replies' here. I am very reticent about performing. I am a flute player and do not have anything like the facility on the piano that I have on the flute, so we shall see. I think I need at least six more months before I would consider my piano playing to be ready for public consumption, but I might play something in the Schubert challenge!
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Thank you for sharing!
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Roy - thanks for sharing all this. Like you, I just "retired" (working less but still working) and have been amping up my practice time & methods. The spreadsheet gave me some good ideas for organizing my practice. Thanks for sharing that!
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Steve Coffey You are very welcome. The planning has helped me hugely. I am really concerned to be more familiar with the scales, which have had very little attention over the years. This is the first month that I have played all of them!
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Thanks for sharing your Excel practice sheet. It's excellent!
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I love your spreadsheet so much, I've decided to make one for myself. Great idea! (And I know all about "retiring". We keep trying to do it, and keep getting calls to work on projects. LOL!)
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Gail Starr Just about to upload Month 2!
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Month 1 went really well. Here is Month 2! I am so pleased that for the first time in my life I have played through all of the scales - majors and harmonic minors! I can see why Bach Fugues have a reputation of their own. I spent the first two weeks on page 1 of the C Minor Fugue - mostly separate voices and then separate hands. It's easier to some extent to do both voices in the right hand so that the fingering makes sense. I then started to join up some sections on page 1 and started Page 2, using the same format. I planned for six weeks on this fugue but I may revise that to six months - for my first reading! I had done an introduction to Bach on Tonebase by Magdalena Stern-Baczewska so I am including in this and next month's practice the pieces she recommended. I now have much more of a sense that there is possibly a staged process for approaching Bach, which is a relief!
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Roy James-Pike , I'm also working on the C-minor fugue. If you're using an urtext version, it's helpful to get some tips on phrasing--which notes to play legato vs separated. I had a teacher who had first taught me this piece write in the phrasing for me.
The phrasing is also in the lesson by Evan Shinners just before the 3 min mark, but I found it helpful to read off the text with the phrasing written in.
My current piano teacher teaches jazz piano so wasn't familiar with it, but he was almost certain it inspired the theme song to the movie Jurassic Park.
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Fabulous! I just started mine today!
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Gail Starr Good on you, Gail!
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Roy James-Pike I worked on a jazz piece (How high the Moon), the Dvorak Piano Quintet Op. 81 and am still trying to select a Schubert Impromptu.
Have you picked a Schubert piece?
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Gail Starr I am practising Nos 7 and 15 of the Seventeen German Dances and Two Ecossaisen. The first German Dance is the one that Liszt transcribed, which we did in a previous challenge. I have played at least eight of the waltzes in the past along with the Two Ecossaisen.
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Anthony Miyake Hello Anthony, I saw your reply in my emails but I cannot find it on Tonebase. However, I have listened to the Jurassic Park theme [John Williams] and it is the Bach C Minor fugue but played in B flat, so you're teacher is correct. It's lovely to hear that yo are learning to play jazz too. Yes, my copy is Urtext from around fifty years ago, and yes, it's always interesting to see how others would phrase the older music.
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Anthony Miyake ...your teacher, not you're
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Roy James-Pike , yes, apologies. When clicking the link, I see that it tries to get a sign-up for access, but we're already members, so hopefully the direct link below should work.
Also uploading the image of the first page with the phrasing the teacher who first taught me this piece wrote in. This was many years ago when I first went off to college and audited a piano lesson. The teacher had taught this piece many times so had very fixed ideas on how it should be played. But others might have other thoughts, so please feel free to take as much or as little as you want from this example. He didn't write in phrasing for page 2, because the concepts are the same as page one, so just need to be carried over.
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Anthony Miyake Thank you Anthony. I did not know that TB had done a teaching session on this but it's pretty obvious to me now that they would have. I shall incorporate this into my Practice dairy! Thanks again.
