Here there be dragons...

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me." - Winterson

A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new

So the last song I worked on in my pianoing was my first "advanced" lol which I realise is nowhere near advanced by normal standards, but that's what the app calls it so why not.  It took me 6 weeks to learn 20 bars, and 90% of the left hand I'd learned in the intermediate version of the same song.  Multiple hours to get through single bars.  A, super painful.  B, sheer stubbornness got me through it.  C, I am fully aware even the "successful" version is atrocious, but technically I got through it hitting all the right notes ;).   There were two different pieces of notation I had to google what they meant.  And after all that, I realised I was definitely at the point where I needed help.  (Clip here for the brave or curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZcUNacZ1Pk)

Accurate.  Except that I love my husband enough to wear headphones.

After the assessment and my free admission that I can't effectively read bass clef yet, and my theory is minimal, we're starting with the "level 2" book.  lol level 2 is super basic from both a playing and theory standpoint, but it that means it gives a chance to catch up on any/all basics that I missed.   Top of that list: how I hold my hands.   He corrected it in the first lesson, but I didn't really get it.   In the second lesson the light started flickering a little more and while it will undoubtably take me forever to fix, ("shorten your reins" anyone?), at least conceptually I get it.

My teacher is an older gentleman w a reasonably strong accent - my guess would be Eastern European or German? Idk - I’m really bad w accents lol. The ESL factor makes explanations a little iffy and I’m definitely an overgrown toddler in needing to understand “why” ;).  My favourite was being told:  “You must rest!” Hmmmm I feel like I might’ve heard that before ;). In this case, when I'm sight reading music I have a tendency to just ignore any form of rests ;-P

Re the whole hand position thing - I have to acknowledge that once the light started flickering, both the YouTube teachers whose videos I've been learning from have mentioned the same, but sometimes you need someone in person to actually show you how what you're doing isn't what you *think* you're doing...  (I swear the advent of cell-phone video cameras made teaching riding *so* much easier when I could show people that what they *felt* they were doing and what they were actually doing might not be exactly the same ;). AND, importantly, how to fix it.

So today I revisited my nightmare song with new learning in place.  One bar.  About an hour.  Slowed down to about 25%.  But I got it ;). And after I got it, I could speed it back up.  And eventually - was significant improvement over what I'd had before.  In an hour.  So I'm deeming that one a win and am actually fairly excited about it :)


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