Month: January 2024

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.

Some thoughts at the start of the year

I’ve already done a review of last year and talked a bit about some of the things I did [or not did] last year. But I have signed up for Pianist membership so that I get [what I have wanted for a long time] ongoing access to the digital archive – this matters to me because they have a lot of really nice music and accompanying tutorials.

In the latest issue which I think is from pre=Christmas, there is a piece on deciding (as an adult) to do an exam and a lot of practical advice. I value it a lot. It covered some practical advice, some timing and planning advice, discusses some of the pitfalls.

I’m also interested in using the sheet music as a resource for improving my sight reading. I’ve two major goals I think:

  • Complete the prep for Grade 6 and do it
  • Start the prep for Grade 8.

Supporting that are some improvements in basic skills, such as the dreaded polyrhythms and above all else, the sheet music reading fluency. For me, it’s not good enough but having gone through a lot of the tutorials on reading sheets, it’s obvious to me, I have the basic skills in place. None of the hints are new, I understand intervals. I understand the mnenomics and have done for years. I have some trouble with extreme ledger lines. These things are basically practice.

In the last few months, maybe the last 6 months, I have put a lot of resources into becoming a better piano player. This site is one; I’ve signed up for ToneBase, I have signed up for a Pianist membership, you can find me on Tonic for practice accountability. I have bought a metronome and I want another one (you can probably have too many metronomes – I have a lovely Seiko one which is totally not helpful for dealing with my Bach pains). What I want, more or less, is to be able to play any [bits of] music I want to. The grades are less to do with that and more to feed a little piece of my ego that is feeling neglected.

I’m also looking at practice journaling – I already log what gets practiced on a day to day basis since start of this year (a very nice Japanese agenda is used for that). One of the points raised in the Pianist article I mentioned above related to the difference between practice and rehearsal. This is not something that occurred to me but I’m happy enough to consider it – it allows me to highlight the differences between my Mendelssohn (rehearsing, sort of) and my Bach (ugh practising).

Nice Cup of Tea

When I look at my weaknesses, the number one item on that list (according to me anyway) are polyrhythms. I understand how to calculate how the beat is divided but I struggle to make it work. So I addressed this Gap via Professor of Music Youtube.

For 2/3 polyrhythms, there are two notable videos which I am going to place here:

RIAM Practising 3 against 2 rhythm

What I like about this one is it provides a scale exercise for making your fingers work on the concept.

Denis Zhdanov has a very useful video here also.

Currently I am working on these away from the piano and I’m interested to see that I can manage them away from the piano.