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Showing posts from March, 2015

"Don't practice until you get it right. Practice until you can't get it wrong."

There is no source for this quotation, which in itself is inspirational: pedagogue musicians have perhaps been saying it to their students for the last two or three thousand years. At work, we've been enduring "Traffic Week", (a colossal exercise in "teslik"), and everyone was given a kind of party bag containing colouring books and crayons, (dished out to grown men, mind), and a pack of cards to play some kind of Happy Families safety game. So I've given each of the cards a value from the ABRSM Grade 1 Piano syllabus scales and broken chords. For example, the card "Follow The Speed Limit" on a red background = A minor harmonic RH. That was the first one I turned over, and I set about learning the scale, playing it again, again, again; looking at the music, looking at the keys, looking at my hands, looking out the window, slowly, quickly, pianissimo, fortissimo, again, again, again. The same mistakes kept coming up, mis-playing the F on the way u