Today's Progress

So, I didn't get any practicing in during the day. Maybe 5 minutes total. I sat down and started playing my nocturne but didn't get very far. Today was very busy, and we were gone this evening, so I was worried I wouldn't be able to get in all my time today.

Both my husband and I had volunteer work with youth at our church tonight. This means The Children had to come with us. Fortunately, there were several other kids there tonight for the girls to play with, and they had a great time running around the church causing all kinds of problems. This did mean that we got home well after their 8 o'clock bedtime, and children weren't snuggled up in their beds dreaming sweet dreams until closer to 10.

Which is when I began my practice tonight.

I first worked on the nocturne (duh). I'm getting quite a bit farther on page 3. I'm surprised how much easier this work is for me than I initially thought. It's going much more quickly than I anticipated. I'll need to spend a lot of time working on detail work, but it will be nice to be able to play it through at a decent tempo. One problem that I have being ADD is that my mind starts wandering if I play a piece too far below tempo, so I find it difficult to sightread for that reason (and a couple others, including the fact that when I first learned to play I couldn't see and essentially learned to play by ear and shape before I learned to read music well).

For some reason, I wasn't really feeling the nocturne today and stopped practicing early and went on to a waltz for a little while. This helped me to keep my focus and continue on for a total of 65 minutes (70 if you count earlier today... and since I have little kids, I count every second I spend at the piano, assuming I'm not just goofing off).

Then I worked on Prelude 21 by Bach. I'm having a bit of trouble keeping it even. It is a very quick piece and is really fun to play. I worked this one for about 10 minutes and moved on to the accompanying fugue, which I worked on for about 20 minutes.

For the last little bit of my practice time, I worked on Clair de Lune and tried to record it for you. I am not going to share it, however! For some reason, once the record button is pressed, I start making stupid mistakes that I never make while practicing.

One thing I have noticed, though, is I make fewer mistakes when I play a good piano. So the Kawai at church? That's well maintained and tuned semiannually? I sound really good and hardly make any mistakes.

My next mission is to find time about once a month to record at the church and share it here. I would aim for more often, but... well, it's just hard to find a couple hours that I can spend playing piano away from home without the kids.