Inquiry 3: Practice Techniques
This week I practiced about 10minutes a day and I tried a few techniques that I remember for mastering difficult parts of a song. The following videos are of the end of my last practice session where I started with Moonlight Sonata and finished with City of Stars. It is difficult to hear much improvement from my previous post because I am showing a practice technique and then playing the second part of City of Stars, but I do feel more comfortable playing the songs which is positive headway.
Moonlight Sonata
This song has proved to be trickier than it sounds when played professionally (shocker! haha) I was really struggling with the chords and moving line in both hands and I felt like my going over the same bar again and again was doing little to advance my learning. This is when I decided to try something I remembered from my old piano lesson days; playing the chords in place of the individual notes. The moving line in this piece follows a similar theme to many other classical pieces of this time, every few bars the notes change, but the pattern or shape of the chord is close to identical so playing the notes as a solid chord can help with the transitions. You can listen on the right to what this sounds like during practice.
City of Stars
I am really enjoying this song, I love practicing a something that I can sing along to in my head. You can listen to the excerpt I took near the end of my practice session on the left, it is the second of three sections in the song. The way the music is arranged the sections have an obvious start and end which makes practicing interesting because if I get bored or frustrated with one part I can jump to a different one. The second part of this song is more difficult than the first part which I played for you during my last entry, this is why I slowed down the tempo substantially. I wanted to make sure that I was hitting as many correct notes as possible to build a muscle memory in my hands before speeding it up to the correct speed. I think I will play the third part for you in my next entry, and it will probably be even slower than this because it is much harder; there is lots of jumping around the piano in the final section.
I will continue my goal of practice 10 minutes a day and hopefully there will be even more improvement! I linked professional recordings of the two songs in my last blog post, so this time I think I will link another awesome piano song that is in my accomplished folder!
Here is Golden Hour by JVKE