20240210 Practice Diary

This week, on Tonic, I was in the Gold list having gotten myself promoted a couple of weeks in a row. Now, playing with the big boys and girls. The ones who clearly don’t have full time jobs. * rueful smile.

I haven’t done today’s practice session yet so who knows this could change after I have done it. It was at best a mixed week. I missed at least one day because I was at a concert (a good reason, you would admit). But I also started a new job and much to my surprised this has resulted in me getting home later rather than earlier. I didn’t have so much time to practice, and also not so much time to listen in to other people practising.

So, in terms of what went well: the Mendelssohn is getting slightly more security; it’s not where I want yet but okay, there are no obvious weaknesses except when I am tired. The Rebikov is now more or less internalised but in some odd hybrid short/long term memory mess. This means some times I can play it under finger without one error; last night I spent a lot of time again trying to render a section of fluent, a section that I know intelleuctually in my mind but my fingers take on crab like features of their own and I watch as a C sharp/A figure turns into something akin to a diminished chord undescribed in no music theory text book; a flow of notes that my wrists do not wish to play even as I know in my mind what notes they are. More work is required. Nevertheless, despite being the last of the pieces I started learning, it is the second closest to ready.

For Elissa Milne’s Indigo Moon, I have struggled to memorise this. I would like all four pieces to be memorised so there’s work to be done here. I didn’t touch this for several months (and it shows) but although I can’t play it fluently at all, it is in reasonable health for the effort it got. With both Rebikov and Mendelssohn demanding less time over the coming month or two, I expect this to be okay as it was fluent at one point. The shapes are broadly okay for my fingers.

This leads us to the Bachs, Johann Sebastien and his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel. Invention in E major is out (I have no idea but it really wasn’t coming for me at al) and Solfeggio is in. The read through for that went okay, and the chunks of it getting touched in practice is about half the piece. This is a piece that I absolutely have to memorise – I cannot read at Prestissimo velocity – and it is a piece that demands work with a metronome. It is nowhere close to written speed and that will be a while. But it altogether feels more realistic than his father’s easy training piece. It will also feed into the Rameau I have lined up for after.

Outside that, there were two or three other pieces this week. Reddit’s Piano Jam for the month had a small waltz by Shostokovich so I read that through, and I’ve also been working on the infamous C Major prelude that is Fur Elise-sque in its popularity with being hacked to pieces and murdered screaming. I’m influenced by Alexandre Tharaud’s carefully pedalled recording. I am happy with how this is going although strangely enough I struggle to memorise it. But it is very easy to read. And just because I was super angry about the Bach invention last week and needed something more motivational, I have Handel’s Sarabande on the go, also easy to read, but I haven’t tried the couple of variations yet.

At some point I need to write a piece on sightreading and discuss all the can’t lose hints I keep seeing.

20240204 Practice Diaries

It appears I missed last week. I don’t think last week was a good week anyway. I missed a few days but I still got myself into the silver league on Tonic.

This week hasn’t been the worst. I missed two days – the first two days of a new job. There was measurable progress. I’m working four pieces this week, with some snipping time on one other piece. There was nothing from the 40 pieces challenge.

So: Bach, my nemesis 2 part invention in E major. Light of my life, dark of my soul. This week, bar 7 is severely weakened and I am very slowly gaining ascendency. It’s far from perfect but in slow practice it is rarely wrong. At speed, it is always wrong. But that’s okay. I’ve started working on the second part and while the same rhythm pattern is to be found, it is not causing the same trouble so far. I have a way to go. What is likely to be more of an issue is the fingering on black keys. I have a lot of work to do there. I estimate it will take about a month at the current practice rate.

The Mendelssohn is more or less under control and in that zone where it’s being practice not to make mistakes in it. This will also reduce the amount of time going to it so next week I will start back at Elissa Milne’s piece.

Rebikov is heading the same way. There are occasional memory and fingering hick ups and I honestly hope my neighbours like it because they heard it a lot yesterday. I must say I like the piece a lot more than I expected when I started learning it first – it has some unusual fingering shapes but I know it has freed up the lack of flexibility in my fingers a lot. I expected that more from the Bach but it isn’t really happening. Anyway, over the next week or so, I expect the practice focus to move from getting it right to not getting it wrong. I will keep this and the Mendelssohn in regular repertoire afterwards.

For non-exam pieces, the main work is on one of Bach’s preludes – the famous one, basically. I like the way it sounds and it forces me to address how I practice – I practice to memorise, this is clear. Anyway, I’d like to finish that and add it to repertoire as well.

The open question, of course, is what I move to as the time taken by these pieces reduces and I work towards the exam rather than the learning. An obvious answer is to start looking at the exam pieces for Grade 8 which I’ve targeted before end of 2025. The one I would like to start most is Rameau’s Cyclops but I also have a map in my mind about what needs to be finished to feed into the next grade and for the Rameau I would like to be on top of the Bach. I am not on top of the Bach. For the Rebikov, the choice is either the Rachmaninoff or Debussy. The fixed pieces are:

Rameau – Les Cyclopes
Tchaikovsky June from the Seasons
Debussy Reverie
Rachmaninov, Moment Musical Opus 16/5

The obvious ones to start with are the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. I will map the Debussy to Milne and the Rachmaninov to Rebikov. Tchaik builds on Mendelssohn.

I don’t want to constantly say we’ll see and depending on where they go, I might revise my planning. Grade 6 is currently pencilled in for April which, Bach pending is now realistic provided the practice schedule does not fall apart.

For January, it feel apart on the days I was travelling. I find that okay.

Practice plans on ToneBase

I haven’t had a lot of time there later but I see there is a new tutorial on trills (this is good news) and I answered the questions for a practice plan. This resulted in a list of 8 courses to follow:

How to sightread with both hands
How to play repeated notes
How to play arpeggions in inversions
How to use the left pedal
Playing Short Trills, Mordents and Trills
Pavane pour une infante defunte
Controlling the 6 Primary Dynamics
Illuminating Beethoven.

That last one is with Seymour Bernstein and I really like his delivery.

Anyway, it’s not a bad set of recommendations. I’m not saying I can’t sight read with both hands (I can) but if there are useful tips, this would be good. Repeated notes I need to practice, and the arpeggios in inversions I used to do as a teenager. One thing I have found is what I did as a teenager is often described differently by the American teachers (which is basically ToneBase, from my point of view). For the pedals, yeah, I use the sustain a lot because I love the echoing sound it produces. I typically used the left pedal on my acoustic to shut myself up as a teenager so probably that lecture is going to be illuminating.

The surprising one is the Pavane. I honestly thought that was probably beyond my level. It is on my to be learned list although not on my Learning List playlist on my phone – I must rectify that – but it was for later. I’ll give a listen to that lesson as well later on.

20240127 Practice Diary

This week was not the most productive on the question of practice. According to my practice tracker, I did three days this week and that includes this morning’s one hour session. I was travelling this week and I did have a few out of the ordinary commitments.

On the plus side I will league up on Tonic more than likely later tonight, so there is that, I suppose. Last week I didn’t come close but then there were some seriously dedicated people practising last week.

So, this week, the focus is on two- three main things. Currently I am working on fault free run throughs of the Mendelssohn – it is Tantalisingly close. Some of the trips are much more secure now but the piece as it whole doesn’t run cleanly. I’m also polishing up some of the musicality. I like the way it sounds.

The other main target is this Rebikov piece that I landed on for the self selection. I’m starting to really like it and also it is almost close to Ready For Polishing.

But it’s an odd one. Some days, the first half of it is so solid you could build a forty storey apartment block on top of it. This morning, you’d hesitate to place a feather on it. I love elements of the melody patterns in it, and the flow of the voices. I spent some of this morning’s practice on the last 12 bars. These are not secure yet but as I will do a second practice after lunch, I have strong hopes for it to be ready to polish. If I can successfully film some of it later, I might do an entry on it. We’ll see.

I also did some work on the Bach. It is breaking my heart. I didn’t find a tutorial for it on either Josh Wright or Tonebase for that specific Invention yet. Although I see tutorials for other inventions and am wondering about listening into them.

For the fourth piece, the Milne, I didn’t touch it this week.

The sight reading piece was an E Flat Ecossaise by Beethoven. It really did not fit my fingers at all – very much the feeling it works for a child. I resented working on it. I will do some Burgmuller this week, I think. Meh.

On the place side, the Rebikov is coming along and I really like it – in fact, I like these pieces much more than I liked the exam pieces I did as a teenager.

20240121 Practice Diaries

It wasn’t a great week for practice and I only got a couple of slots in. Also, I didn’t progress up to the silver leave in Tonic so yeah, bit disappointing.

I am struggling with the Bach. So much so I think I will see if Josh Wright has a lesson specifically for that piece (he doesn’t, I have just checked).

For the Mendelssohn Gondola Song, this morning was frustrating. I am getting to the stage where I would like to record it for the youtube and instagram and despite knowing every note of it cleanly, I’m struggling to get it clean through. And there is no consistent mistake. If there was, I could clean it. I love it though, it doesn’t pain me to replay it repeatedly but it pains me not to get it right repeatedly.

What I did work on a lot this week is Autumn Leaves (3, con afflizione) by Vladimir Rébikov. This is one of two pieces by him on my radar. A year or two ago, Pianist pulled out his Christmas Tree waltz for one of their Christmas repertoire suggestions. I haven’t started that yet (maybe I should, together with another Christmas piece I’d like to have ready for next Christmas. Need to update the repertoire plan I guess).

This is a two page piece, in F sharp minor. I don’t remember learning anything in that key before but I know I have pulled stuff out by ear in that key when I was a teenager (and also C sharp minor, was a big achievement when I was 15). Anyway, without going into the details I had serious reservations about it at the beginning – fingers weren’t the right shape and I questioned the wisdom of doing it. At some point, when it is finished, I will disassemble it, video it, and do an entry on it. One of the interesting things about it though is that there are not a lot of recordings of it around – the one I have on my learning list on Apple Music is I think Anthony Goldstone. Bing Chat cannot find it but if you have an IMSLP subscription, it is there too from what I can see.

It’s a piece I have come to like a lot – there are some gorgeous progressions in them. But the fingering is unduly challenging for my left hand. On the plus side, it will feed into what I want to learn.

In both cases, I have struggled a lot with memory in playing this morning. It may be because I haven’t had enough sleep lately (I haven’t, this is true). My fingers are slipping a lot more easily than I ever remember being the case before since Christmas. I keep the piano keys covered and I dust but still. It’s like the ice I have enjoyed (not) this week in Brussels. That’s infuriating.

I have not [yet] today touched the Bach or the Hillne. I will probably do a second and third practice session later on today. I will need to work on the Bach and also analyse where those rhythmic figures turn up. At some point if I get through that (and do the exam) I should write/vlog that up too.

On the 40 pieces project, I started the second piece today. It’s an Ecossaise in E flat major by Beethoven. In many requests it is very easy; I just don’t like it very much. But I can see that it is instilling some reading discipline in me, this and the Haydn. You’ll find notes on the pieces when I feel like updating it on the relevant page.

In other crazy ideas, things which went wrong: La Jetée by Yann Tiersen, particularly late last night; and I bought some more sheet music because Brahms OP 79. Shout out to the sheet music shop who saved me the danger of browsing it. I need to do a read through with a recording because the initial sight read was a bit of a disaster.

In general, the weeks (there have been more than one) where I get to do daily practice of around 90 minutes are hugely piano productive for me. So I like that very much. It’s just this week again will be disrupted but at least there is only one day of business travel.

20240113 Piano Diaries

I was travelling for work this week and coincidentally, the Henle Challenge was running on Tonic. Not a good week for me not to be getting a lot of practice in. I’m also not super organised with the ToneBase live streams.

But I am listening to a stream on rejuvenating my practice…Some of it is quite interesting. Anyway, in light of all this, where do we stand on various things:

On the 40 pieces, the first pieces was a piece by Haydn, Minuet in F Hob IX:8 No 11. It’s the first piece of Haydn I remember learning and it’s rather pretty. I have more or less finished learning it, so I need to choose another piece and put it by the piano.

On the Grade 6 project, I’m working seriously on all four pieces now. This is what happens when you find 90 minutes to practice every day. It also sucks when you miss those 90 minutes(Tuesday, Wednesday I am looking at you this week). Here’s the current summary:

Bach Two part invention in E major: about 30% done, the famous bar 7 occasionally correct now and a couple of the errors rooted out. Need to take a look at the second part of it to identify other similar rhythm pitfalls
Mendelssohn Gondollied 19/6: This is being polished. It’s committed to memory and now it’s in the “practice until you can’t get it wrong” mode. There are a couple of places that are slightly more frequent problems but in general, I can play it through with only 1 or 2 errors. This is really good news
Rebikov’s afflicted autumn leaves: this is about 60% done much to my surprise – a lot of progress this week. I’m also starting to enjoy it and there are some progressions in it that I really love.
Milne: Indigo moon: this is about 50% done again. It’s not instinctive to memorise for me.

Mostly I try to touch all four pieces daily and once they are all memorised, I will be practising them as a performance.

A week in review

I probably should be asleep but instead I am here with the end of the Christmas chocolate and a mug of tea. This week, since Tuesday (I was travelling on Monday), I have averaged about 90 minutes a day practising the piano. The bulk of my effort has gone to Bach and Mendelssohn but I have a policy of “touching” the other two pieces at least once a day. Why I am I focusing on the first two? Because certain elements of them are tantalising close to a positive point of no return.

The Mendelssohn piece – one of the Songs without Words known as a Gondola song, 19b in G Minor (it’s mentioned all over the place and as I type I’m listening to Igor Levit’s rendition) – is the reason I did the Grade 6. I had toyed with skipping – after all, I just wanted the grade 8 so I could do the diplomas later if I wanted. I want very much to do them. Now that I am listening to Levit’s version, I realise I probably too often play it too fast. This is something I can fix relatively easily. I do slow practice anyway.

Anyway, I want to polish it but first, I would like for the fingering to be securely accurate. For me, this means playing it correctly more often than not. There isn’t a bar in the piece I can’t play accurately so the problems are lying in the glueing all of the pieces together. I love the voicing in it. I loathe the pieces I consider dragons, the pieces I struggle or struggled to play correctly. I’m incredibly close to it. So, so close. So I keep playing with a huge degree of focus and I’m so close to getting it right.

The other is the Bach dragon. There is a particular rhythm which turns up occasionally in the E major two part invention which I am I’m struggling to render correctly when one rhythm pattern is played on the left hand rather than the right. One example of it is in bar 7. I’ve written about it elsewhere but here’s the offending piece of music:

Bach777_FirstPart — Inventio number 6 in E Major, by that nice Mr JS Bach

I’m really, really close to getting it right. REALLY close.

but not quite there. The net outcome is currently Vladimir Rebikov’s afflicted autumn leaves and Elissa Milne’s Indigo Moon are not getting adequate love and attention.

I have averaged 94 minutes practising since Monday. About 90% of that went to Bach and Mendelssohn between then. I’ve also worked a little bit on Brahms 118/2, one of the bridges and it has some polyrhythms so I have worked on that too (hence the post the other day).

When I read/watch tuition on best ways of practice, there’s a point at which most say “blindly repeating things is a waste of time”. I get the need for a strategic approach to practice. But eventually if you haven’t played something right, because, for example, your fingers are slipping off the black notes (I feel like my keys are very slippery lately)m and you make an occasional mistake, well, you can’t not go through it again.

Ultimately, I’m going to be playing these pieces a lot – one of the next things will be to play them in the order in which I intend to present them for the Grade 6 exam which is Bach, Mendelssohn, Rebikov, Milne, ie, the order in which they were composed.

In the grand scheme of things, it was a productive week.

I can mostly get the Mendelssohn right
I can most get the Mendelssohn right
The Bach Bar 7 is moving in the right direction
I’m practising daily at the moment
I’ve picked up the Milne and the Rebikov again
I’ve started picking at the Brahms I want to learn
I’m planning a miniproject to improve the sight reading (need to select the 40 pieces and put them in a spreadsheet.

All told, better than last week, and in fact, better than most of November and December in which I barely touched the piano. I’ve probably doubled my 3 month practice total in just this week alone. Pretty much everything I touched is showing an improvement.

Oh and I also realised that my Soundbrenner app on my phone has some handy features on the metronome front that my Seiko does not have.

On the gap analysis: Sight reading

Having written two rants on organisational stuff, I want to touch on where I see skills gaps that I want to resolve over the coming year that support the fluffy “I wanna play anything I want” aspiration we all have when we listen to Chopin.

As noted elsewhere, I have some sight reading fluency gaps. That is to say, the ledger lines still have to be counted and although I drilled them a lot last year, it’s different in actual sheet music rather than on an app while you are getting the bus to work. The other thing I want to fix are ornaments.

There are plenty of resources around for that and one of the things I intend to do is put them into my sheet music sketchbook. It’s a solvable problem and then once that is done, they will need some practice. I expect one of the practice goals to be achieved sometime in the next few days so will put that into the rotation of what I do.

Sight reading demands a bit more effort. I’ve watched enough videos to know that the issue is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of fluency. In short, I need to read more by sight. There are no tricks beyond that other than how to achieve this. Given I’ve just written a rant on the question of excessively devoting time to planning and pussying around with journals and the like, what comes out of this entry might be unexpected.

One of the things I need to make some decisions around is how much time to devote to this. I like to hope that soon, I will not be devoting 45 minutes to Bar 7 of a Bach invention (it’s frustrating given how fast the rest of it will go). I’ve seen some people talk about 10 minutes on sight reading a day, or 30 minutes a week. I’m not sure which one goes faster.

I came across something via reddit this morning: some user pointed at the 40 pieces challenge on Piano World. I dug a little deeper and came up with this blog entry by Elissa Milne. I know this name. She wrote one of my Grade 6 pieces, the jazz piece, Indigo Moon. It’s a lovely piece which will be getting much more of my attention after the dreaded Bar 7 of Bach.

The general idea is to learn at least a piece a week. I liked the underlying thought here because basically, I lived it.

The more students progressed in degrees of difficulty the more their sight-reading skills lagged behind.
Elissa Milne

You should read the piece. It’s an eye opener to know that this has been an issue for about 170 years. It’s one of the week points of the music grade systems in the Anglo Saxon world, I think. That aside.

Where I run into problems – and have done with 100 Days of Practice – is that real life can very often be a great obstacle to dealing with my dreams of playing more Chopin. I get a bit sad when I see people talking about how everyone has the same 24 hours a day. Honestly, the quality of those 24 hours vary dependent on how many of them you have to spend getting money to live on or washing dishes. There’s a reason that there’s a saying Behind every great man, there’s a great woman. Someone had to do the laundry and it wasn’t the man.

So, in reflection over breakfast, I muse on this, and here is one place where planning is truly an investment. It’s not an investment in individual practice sessions but in a series of them. Sure, teachers who engage in this with the kids they are teaching will have a well of resources but for an adult Who Is An Amateur, it’s worth planning this in some way.

There are a couple of useful sources here (and they can be built into a forScore setlist I believe).

Anna Maria Bach’s little notebook
Bach: Little Preludes and Fugues
r/piano piano challenges probably up to level 4 or 5
The ABRSM lists for grades up to Grade 4
The TCM lists for grades up to Grade 4
The RCM lists for grades up to Grade 6

There are books of pieces knocking around. Hal Leonard does one. But I might want to choose freely and there is IMSLP.

Here’s where my inner project manager comes out: pick 40, not including the two easy ones you know already such as the Petzold, and list them in an Excel Spreadsheet. And then tick them off. Put them on the YouTube Channel on a playlist.

We will see how it goes.

I am an amateur pianist

To be frank, if I had a life plan, the reality did not exactly align with it. What this means is I didn’t comply with society’s expectations for me (to bankrupt myself buying property in a property boom in Ireland, effectively) and I only got around to buying my own piano when I was 49 years old. I started hiring one about 4 years before that. So for a good chunk of my life, I assumed that as soon as I bought an overpriced house in Ireland, I would wander down to Pianos Plus and buy a piano too. Something to play until I had saved up the money for a grand piano, probably a Kawai. They have nice grand pianos.

The holy all of that is that for most of my adult life, I didn’t play the piano regularly. I played pianos in piano shops. I was too scared and shy to play them in railway stations, such that the first time I did was emotionally a big thing. I chose the Gare du Nord to do it as well. For some reason, I’ve always been afraid of disturbing people. I’m not sure why. Plenty of people disturb me. Anyway, the frank end all of this is that I’m never going to be a concert pianist and people are never going to be discussing my habit of wearing trainers and a Christian Dior dress on the stage of a concert hall. I don’t know how Yuja Wang plays the pedal with high heel shoes. That aside. I do want to play as well as I can and that means pushing myself.

One of the other things I put myself through were work recitals and there, there were a lot of people who clearly played classical music better than I can. There are a couple of reasons for this but the clear one is they played more than I did. I’m not saying I want to catch up but I will say this: if I play more I will get better.

There is a lot of material about getting better at the piano on the internet. None of it is really obviously pitched at me or people like me.

Most of what I find on the internet – with some notable exceptions – assume one of two things:

I am a complete and utter beginner
I am a full time student with aspirations of being a full time concert pianist playing all the great concert halls.

There are different impacts for both assumptions:

Complete and utter beginner

Here’s all the stuff you need to learn how to read music. Here are easy arrangements of famous pieces of music. Here are cheat sheets so that you can get away without practising that much. Here are crappy videos so you don’t even have to learn how to read music in the first place.

Full time student who is the next Evgeny Kissin

You have all the time in the world to engage in reading crap tonnes of things, practice 12 hours a day, create practice journals, bullet journal planning, learn every study written by Chopin plus the Liszt transcendentals.

I am none of these people.

Seriously. I would suggest that the following is more likely to be true: I’m not a complete beginner. I also have a full time job that often spills over into more than full time. There are days I have worked pretty much 12 hours. I spent a good chunk of my life dealing with household management. For any adult, especially people who have kids or pets, there is not 24 hours in every day. I sometimes have to get up at 5.30 to go on business trips. I get home at 8 or 9pm. Around that, I have to eat, clean. All that.

What I am saying is that for people like me, we’re looking for a little organisational help which does not involve spending ages in personal piano administration. I do not want to spend time doing lots of planning in advance of a practice session. Right now I’m trying to correct fingering for one bar of Bach. I don’t need to write a paragraph or a bullet point on this.

I probably need a teacher but without cleaning up my work schedule it’s going to be difficult (it’s coming though, oh boy is it coming).

So, yeah, I intend to avoid the YouTube videos that tell me to spend time I haven’t got over planning one line objectives: Play this piece properly.

That aside, I want to mention that there are a couple of actual teaching accounts which focus on technique and clue you in for how to play particular pieces. So special mention to the online teachers who assume you can organise yourself but if your objective includes dealing with the polyrhythms in Debussy and Brahms, here’s some support. Kudos thus to ToneBase, Josh Wright Piano, Denis Zhdanov, LeCheile music, Pianist Magazine

That being said, Pianist Magazine ran a competition for amateurs and wrote a piece on a review of their competitors and how many of them had full time, often highpowered jobs. They focused a bit too much on the music/maths link for my liking.

I suspect the vast majority of people who buy that magazine are people who are not full time concert or otherwise pianists. In many respects, it’s the people who love pianos, the sounds pianos make and they sounds they can make with pianos who are where the money is in the piano industry.

More people like me, I guess.

Practice journaling and related thoughts

Since I started being “serious” about objectives with the piano (rather than just sitting at it and playing by ear), I’ve done what people do these days: read a lot of stuff on the internet, and watch a lot of videos on YouTube. It’s the time honoured way these days. Anyway, one concept which comes up now and again on the music front is practice journalling. Journaling and bullet journaling is a hot topic on the self improvement industry, or as I like to dub it, the “you’re not good enough” industry.

I have certain mixed feelings about this, not least one of them being, I’ve been keeping a personal journal for 30 plus years and I started because I fell in love, not because I wanted to do self healing, or be more efficient or change the world. But it’s a habit I have kept up, and in any case, if you have spent any time working in IT, tracking is a habit and if you have been a project manager, well….then.

Anyway. Back in the day about 6 months ago when I was working towards grade 5 theory I selected a notebook and tracked my way through the mock exam papers (several times). I wrote a bit about that here.

The notebook was a very nice Beethoven unlined Paperblanks. It seemed wrong just to abandon it, so it is morphing somewhat into a music planner and journal. I’m just not very systematic in handling it so I of course resorted to TeachTheWorld site, YouTube and Instagram. Neither were very helpful. Nor were comments about rushing to the keyboard. I’ll write a bit more about that in a separate entry in about 25 minutes but in short: I don’t have a lot of free time. I have a piano because I want to play a piano.

Currently I have one primary goal (yes, I know I’ve written something slightly different elsewhere) which is to complete ABRSM Grade 6 Performance. I have four pieces and November and December were washouts (I’ll discuss that in the next entry). The tasks I need to achieve that goal are, basically, play four pieces in a reasonably engaging way such that an ABRSM examiner doesn’t vomit and die on watching the exam video. The four pieces include a piece of Bach which is relatively straightforward, apart from one bar, I’ve written about that too.

So, back with the practice journalling, you get the advice about laying out what you want to achieve with each practice session. I have to be honest. For session A, I want to be able to play Bar 7 of Bach’s two part invention in E major and for session B, I want to be able to play a Mendelssohn song without words without making any fingering errors. I can play every bar of it without an error but by God I can’t string all of them together error free.

One of the big concerns I have about the journaling industry (and not specific to music practice) is that an awful lot of time goes into the planning, the laying out tidily [the use of washi tape, ten colours of highlighters and special pens ordered from Japan and a dozen stamps]. All this takes time. I don’t have this time [watch for that entry].

Journaling for me is not planning. So if I practice journal at all, it’s to outline how I feel about how the practice went, how I feel after it, how frustrated I am, what went wrong, what went right. I think most people would do well to start with that.

It doesn’t have to be in a nice notebook (I have about 100, however because when Covid hit, what I did was Buy NoteBooks, Buy All The NoteBooks) but something that you can put somewhere and get it out after practice if you feel like it (doing practice is a lot of discipline, it being 11pm and your alarm clock being at 6am means that you don’t need to feel guilty about not writing in your practice journal).

If you’re a music student though, these rules will not apply to you. Do the planning. Do the postpractice analysis.