Awaiting New Arrivals

So progress is still steady.

I had some scale practice over the weekend and worked on D major hands together. Started super slow again and managed to get it to a reasonable level. I wondered if when learning just one scale intensely would make it difficult to do other scales as fluently, so I tried E, F, G and A and they all seemed to be okay. It's true that the more you do them, the more natural they become.

Turk's Das Ballet remains pretty solid. I need to go back to mozart and nail down the fingering and spacing. The main problem is spacing my fingers correctly and remembering when not to stretch and space them! It results in me hitting the wrong notes all the time. Must remember to go slow. It's such a strange feeling that when you first start a piece, it feels alien and your fingers have no knowledge of what to do. Once you have done lots of slow practice, it's like you don't have to think about it and it feels second nature. Such a nice feeling.



I have ordered the ABRSM grade 1-5 selection books for the 2013-2014 syllabus. there are 9 pieces in each one, arranged into 3 groups of 3. In the exam, you perform 1 from each group. Looking forward to learning all 9, and then seeing if I should book the grade 1 exam or just start learning the grade 2 pieces. I don't want to get ahead of myself so I'll just wait.

Meanwhile, I'm learning some theory. Getting to grips with natural, harmonic and melodic minor scales. It's never really sunk in before so actually playing them and working them out 'manually' as it were, is helping me to understand them better.

Thats today's update. There will be another tomorrow!