Back to Basics

I've tried and failed now to learn three quite simple pieces, She Moves Through the Fair, Water of Tyne, and Down at the Old Bull and Bush, and it's been such hard work I've not gotten past a few bars on each of them.  So I'm leaving off the pieces until I've spent a whole lot more time with scales and arpeggios.  I was telling Chris at work about this, and he kindly pointed out that I haven't got a good ear - have to admit he's right there, he led us in some singing and he would have noticed.  

So I'm working with the scales, still C major, and now D major. I've got all the key's chords, scales and arpeggios on sheet music - an A4 page for each key, thirty or so in all. So I plan to be doing two at a time, until I get really good at one of them, so that I can play it all over the keyboard without even thinking about it, and then I'll move onto another key, always learning two at a time so that I don't get bored with it.  

And I've got a few apps for my ear.  Or rather for the bunch of synapses or whatever it is that deal with my pitch recognition, currently apparently grown from cloth. I've just bought an iphone, and can spend any idle moments listening to singing blobs, and identifying the note each of them sings.  

And there's another app with a keyboard, a bit advanced for me yet, but it's tutorial had an exercise which I've heard before, and so it's probably a well known practice drill, not until this week known to me however. I really like it. Two eighth notes in the tonic, then a quarter one key up, quarter back on the tonic, rest, two eighths, and then up one more, and back again. So in C it's C-C, D, C; C-C, E, C; et seq. I've been practising it today in C, two hands. It's good because you're getting across the octave in one hand, with the 1RH and 5LH staying on the tonic. 

Seriously thinking of investing in a lesson or two when I'm home in a month's time. I need a good teacher.  I'll probably need to shop around, find one I'm going to get on with long term, so I may as well start now, it could take a while. I need some advice on getting structure in practice, something to fill an hour - I'm just not doing the hour that I should be.  Some days only 15 - 20 mins.  

On the other hand a day never passes when I don't sit down and do at least a few scales. I need a teacher's advice on ways to measure progress, help with my day to day motivation. At the moment, it's a vague intention to be able to play all kinds of stuff in a band by the time I'm 60. But there's a mountain to climb before that, a massive one, and I could do with some milestones. 

I've also realised that I need some competence with the virtual keyboards on tablets and phones. When I tell my students I'm learning keyboards, they naturally whip out their phones and ask for a tune, so I need to learn a few one handed ditties on my iphone. This new wee scale exercise, for starters. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leech or flatworm? Ants and Swiss Chard

Image
For the 2nd time in a week or so, (1st time regarding dwarf beans ), I'm following Alys Fowler's advice, this time with regard to Swiss chard .  Long story short, after midsummer plants which often bolt if planted in spring will resist the impulse to do so, probably because of shortening days; (I say shortening, but in Glasgow, in July, we're still getting 18 hours of daylight).   I got a packet of Bright Lights , at a good price, (another reason to wait until July before sowing, lots of bargains, I've noticed). But where to sow them? Most of the 2nd bed is under a tarpaulin, but it wasn't quite big enough to cover the whole bed, so the last 5ft or so went under a sheet of plastic, (in the background of the photo in this post, here .) Transparent plastic was a foolish idea, weeds were growing underneath it, so I covered most of it with sheets of metal from the old shed. I decided to leave the tarp, but use the area beneath the plastic for the chard. Who-ah there...
Read more

"Chevy Chase. Fuck ever happen to him?"

Image
As Paulie Walnuts said in The Sopranos. It got me thinking. As it happens, he's been working steadily , but you can see what Paulie means. It's like that with film and television actors: you don't see them in anything for a year or two, and you wonder if they're dead or perhaps on a lengthy charlie and booze session. Or maybe doing proper acting on the stage? Only appearing on the telly gives them meaning to us. That video with Paul Simon was on one of the cable music channels the other day. It always makes me smile. As for Paulie and the rest of the crew, the clock's ticking. Of course, America already knows how things finish, but we don't. My mate Ian was telling me about a friend of his, visiting the States a few weeks ago, flicking through the channels in his hotel bedroom, he hit on a repeat of THE final episode, just beginning. What a quandry! He watched it, as it goes, but kept shtum when he came home.
Read more

How many pallets can you fit in the back of a Fiat 500?

Image
At least 1. Maybe I could have got 3 altogether, at a pinch. Also 200+ gorse seeds, which have begun to look in danger of damping off, so I'm thinking they'll be better off at the allotment in the fresh air. I'm worried about slugs, snails and woodpigeons, though, so I put them in a wheelbarrow, covered with a net. Also this morning, planted a row of beetroot detroit.
Read more