We're cooking now!

Here we go. Full steam ahead. This is going to be fun. My exam pieces for grades 1-5 and also the music theory work books 1-5 are ready to go! I know there is a lot of work ahead but prepared to put the time in. Wish me luck!

2000 pageviews! October update

Wow, this blog was meant for me to track my progress and hopefully gather a few people who are doing the same and let them follow along. I went over 2000 page views yesterday! It's very encouraging that even a small amount of people are looking at this little journey of mine.

This week has been slower than usual as work has tken over my life. I've had one or two sessions of scale practice (getting up to 200 bpm with RH D major). Also tackled some broken chord exercises and some chord inversion practice.

I started looking at some jazz voicing for chords too. I realised that learning jazz chord would help with remembering scales as you have 'anchor points' to know where scale degrees are in each key.

Another thing I managed to fit in was some natural, melodic and harmonic minor practice. Not serious memorisation stuff but general ear training and scale familiarity.

I'll hopefull get my abrsm books this week and then it's full steam ahead with learning the 9 grade 1 selections!

Pedal on!

Scale practice D Major Zen Experience

I've been mainly sticking to practicing this scale for a week or two now. For my whole life, whenever I sat at a piano, I would do a C major scale. I didn't know any others. I personally think that the C scale and key is a piano prison. Any advice I would give to beginners is that yes, by all means, have a go at the C major scale, but DON'T stick with it for too long. I would go straight to a key/scale that has at least two sharps in it.  D or A major because they really give you a sense of what practicing in a different key is all about. In fact learning other keys is like learning a whole new instrument.

Anyway, I started the scale at a really low bpm (anything from 60-100 bpm). Abrsm syllabus guidelines are quavers, so when you see the speeds for whatever grade you are going for, you need to do two notes per beat. So when I say 60-100bpm, it means 30-50 bpm with two notes per beats. I just prefer hearing the metronome beat on every pulse so I just double the speed.

Something quite strange happened when I was doing the scale....