Pig Sty Avenue

A breakthrough this morning, giving a definite few tickles to the old endorphin production: I've got all LH of the Minuet in the locker: memorized and all joined up.  The last couple of weeks, I've been warming up with G major scales, all over the 49 keys.  And then broken chords, ditto.  And then the Minuet, RH one day, LH the next.  Because I'm still a fairly slow reader, I find this the only tedious aspect of practice and learning, decoding from the page to the fingers.  But it's worth it for the morning when I get there, at least with one hand, and can play it all through from memory.  RH tomorrow, and if I get a good run at it I should have that memorized too. Although it's trickier than LH, I've probably spent more time on it over the last couple of weeks.  And then Sunday, I can get started with two hands. Which will be hilarious, the notes which tripped off the fingers with one hand just seem to get lost somewhere w...

The midi keyboard felt weird and unpleasant at the start of this week, but I've gotten used to it after a good hour of practice everyday.  Lilliburlero has become a benchmark: last weekend I was all over the place with it, now it's fine, and quite good fun to play it on the app's various virtual pianos.  I spent the three nights this week with various scales and broken chords, but I'm just practising the G majors now because I've gone back to Mozart's Minuet in G.  Been on the first 8 bars for the last three or four nights, RH only, sometimes spending the whole time on one bar, just over and over, getting it right.  For example, today I spent a long time on the opening two notes, using fingers 5 and 4, and making sure my hand was right, that I could get the keys at full velocity without moving my wrist. I'm not setting any time estimates on how long it's going to take to learn, as I was wont to do in the past.  I'm really enjoying...

After a week in transit, (three nights in Al Khobar dealing with admin, and then three nights becalmed in a "suite" at the hotel in Yanbu whilst waiting for a single room to become available) at last I got a room where I'm likely to be staying for several weeks whilst house hunting, and so got unpacked and got the keyboard out onto the writing desk. The iPad was recharging, so I had a go at the Native Instruments software on the laptop. I couldn't get it to work, and it kept crashing - probably too much for this laptop's wee processor, and for my technical abilities.  So I downloaded some open source midi software.  It's less than 1mb, and it's ok but it's got a delay which made playing Lilliburlero feel really weird.  It's usable for scales though, so I spent some time with C major and G major.  I might actually get a couple of benefits from using only the midi keyboard for a month or two. The keys are heavier on the fingers, and it really fe...