Poseur to Composer

Portal to Practice

Posted by Jason Comely on July 23rd, 2019

Portal to Practice
Photo provided by Max Pixel
There's no getting around it. After work, I need to decompress. I can't just dive into keyboard practice as soon as I walk in the door. I'm often tense and hungry. So I feed my cats, slouch in my recliner with some comfort food (usually popcorn) and catch up on email while listening to jazz.
After about an hour I'm relaxed. I make some herbal tea and eat dark chocolate, then practice for about 40 minutes.
This routine is fairly entrenched at this point (I've been doing it for about a month now) and it's rather mundane, but with a mindset change this same routine can become a portal to high performance.
I call this portal a Secret Ceremony. You can read about it on my Medium account but I'll give you the gist here:
A Secret Ceremony consists of everyday activities you do before practice or work, but the arrangement of these actions are meant to gently and incrementally narrow your focus and increase your intensity for the activity ahead.
So if I imagine each action such as going home, feeding my cats, putting on the jazz, making herbal tea and so forth is actually narrowing my focus and priming me for practice, my practice time should be more constructive. It's worked before. I did something similar before going to the gym with excellent effect. It resulted in my first book Zero to Superhero.
It's a cool mind hack. Glad I remembered it.
The Medium article explains how to make your own Secret Ceremony, if your interested in trying it for yourself.

"Let Me Have My Minutes"

Posted by Jason Comely on July 21st, 2019

Filed under: Pdf, Magazine

"Let Me Have My Minutes"

Today I started a course to enhance my future employment prospects. It will take approximately a year to finish, and there will be a final exam at the end. It's as important to me as this music project, so this will be yet another plate to balance in my day-to-day activities.

Piano and Song by Friedrich Wieck, under his alter-ego Dominie, gives advice that relates to my current predicament. It'll be the last passage I share from this book.
Don't be angry with me for my suggestion, ladies: you do not make enough use of the minutes. While our learned education absorbs so much time... we must be sparing of the remaining minutes. "Now I must rush to the piano! I must go to dinner in ten minutes: two scales, two finger exercises, two difficult passages out of the piece I have to learn, and one exercise to invent on the dominant and sub-dominant, are soon done; and then the dinner will taste all the better."
Well, my young ladies, how many hours do you think all those minutes would make in a year? But I hear you say, "What is the use of worrying to pick up all those stray minutes, like lost pins? We have a whole hour to practise every day, when nothing prevents."
Exactly, when nothing prevents. If in piano-playing, or in any art, you wish to attain success, you must resolve to work every day, at least a little, on the technique. Sickness and other unavoidable interruptions deprive you of days enough. Practise always with unexhausted energy: the result will be tenfold. Do you not frequently use the time for practising, when you have already been at work studying for five or six hours? Have you then strength and spirit enough to practise the necessary exercises for an hour or more, and to study your music-pieces carefully and attentively, as your teacher instructed you? Is not your mind exhausted, and are not your hands and fingers tired and stiff with writing, so that you are tempted to help out with your arms and elbows, which is worse than no practice at all?
But, my dear ladies, if you practise properly, several times every day, ten minutes at a time, your strength and your patience are usually sufficient for it; and, if you are obliged to omit your regular "hour's practice," you have, at any rate, accomplished something with your ten minutes before breakfast, or before dinner, or at any leisure moment. So, I beg of you, let me have my minutes.

I'm glad to see that 10-20 minutes of focused practice, several times a day, can really add up. You don't need to commit to several hours of "deep work" to make significant gains. Shorter sessions might even be optimal.

R-r-rules for Piano Pupils

Posted by Jason Comely on July 21st, 2019

R-r-rules for Piano PupilsTurns I misunderstood the concept of family chords. They are not the same as major chords.

Robin was kind enough to clarify the issue on Udemy's Q&A section, and it makes sense to me. Sort of. I understand there are thousands upon thousands of piano chords one can potentially learn. But for the sake of efficiency and health of my arms, it makes sense to only learn chords that are in songs I actually want to play.

Based on that realisation, I know what my next step is. In other news... I finished Piano and Song by Friedrich Wieck today (with the help of an excellent audio recording by Librivox volunteers). It's a strange book, written in an eloquent style that is over-the-top. I found it enjoyable for just that reason, and because it offers lots of direction and advice for both piano teachers and students.

Here's Wieck's Rules for Piano Pupils. As you read this list in your mind, do it with a stuffy english accent and roll your r's. You must never begin to learn a second piece until you have entirely conquered the first. You ought to fix your eyes very carefully on the notes, and not to trust to memory; otherwise, you will never learn to play at sight. In order to avoid the habit of false fingering, you should not play any piece which is not marked for the proper fingers. You should learn to play chords and skipping notes, without looking at the keys, as this interferes with a prompt reading of the notes. You must learn to count nicely in playing, in order always to keep strict time.

He also follows up with this advice: Play and practise the bass part a great deal and very often, first slowly, then quicker, during one or two weeks, before playing the right hand with it, in order that you may give your whole attention to playing the bass correctly, delicately, and surely.