Practice Routine Comes Together and Fun Stuff
I'm on my sixth pass through the new practice routine, and I'm starting to check off pieces as, "performance ready." I have over twenty of the 70 pieces marked off, so things are coming along nicely. I've found that the maximum number of pages of music I can spread across the twin 23" monitors, and still have them large enough to read, is six.
Here's a screen capture of a single page. Since I set the MMM template field at 700 pixels wide, this is actual size.
So, 67% is the size, and what I do is, I create a live Safari window, drag the PDF into it, and then size the first window so the PDF is at 67%. Every new window I create in Safari afterwards is at that size, so setting up for a practice session only takes a minute or two. Then, I put my timer under one of the windows, and I'm off for my 90 minute session. A few pieces, like Classical Gas here, are more than six pages, so I do have to pause and change pages 5 and 6 to 7 and 8, but it's very quick and easy: Just click the down arrow twice for each new page.
For the meat and potatoes pieces, I read through them once, and then play them from memory the second time through. For the crowd pleasers I read through once, and play two times from memory, and for the new repertoire, I read through them one to three times, depending on where I am in the memorization process and how long and difficult they are. Suicide is Painless, for example, is a beeotch, so I just read through it once, while Bianco Fiore is almost memorized, so I read through it three times.
This has proved to be such an efficient and organic system, that I have all of my to-do list in the system now, and am onto my first Sonata One piece, the Tocatta in E Minor. Here's a page from it.
Needless to say, I'm very psyched about this, as I finished the sonata 27 months ago, and for a while thought I'd never get to it.
*****
"And now for something completely different," as they used to say on Monty Python. One of my mom's champion Lhasa Apso show dogs won Best in Breed at the Westminster dog show in NYC last week! Mom's had at least one Lhasa there every year for the past several, but this is the first time she's won the breed. She was there for the show, and when she got home, she was steppin' high. lol.
She's called Lulu for short. I prefer big dogs myself, but mom loves these little dust mops.
Here's a screen capture of a single page. Since I set the MMM template field at 700 pixels wide, this is actual size.
So, 67% is the size, and what I do is, I create a live Safari window, drag the PDF into it, and then size the first window so the PDF is at 67%. Every new window I create in Safari afterwards is at that size, so setting up for a practice session only takes a minute or two. Then, I put my timer under one of the windows, and I'm off for my 90 minute session. A few pieces, like Classical Gas here, are more than six pages, so I do have to pause and change pages 5 and 6 to 7 and 8, but it's very quick and easy: Just click the down arrow twice for each new page.
For the meat and potatoes pieces, I read through them once, and then play them from memory the second time through. For the crowd pleasers I read through once, and play two times from memory, and for the new repertoire, I read through them one to three times, depending on where I am in the memorization process and how long and difficult they are. Suicide is Painless, for example, is a beeotch, so I just read through it once, while Bianco Fiore is almost memorized, so I read through it three times.
This has proved to be such an efficient and organic system, that I have all of my to-do list in the system now, and am onto my first Sonata One piece, the Tocatta in E Minor. Here's a page from it.
Needless to say, I'm very psyched about this, as I finished the sonata 27 months ago, and for a while thought I'd never get to it.
"And now for something completely different," as they used to say on Monty Python. One of my mom's champion Lhasa Apso show dogs won Best in Breed at the Westminster dog show in NYC last week! Mom's had at least one Lhasa there every year for the past several, but this is the first time she's won the breed. She was there for the show, and when she got home, she was steppin' high. lol.
She's called Lulu for short. I prefer big dogs myself, but mom loves these little dust mops.
posted by Hucbald at 7:27 PM
3 Comments:
1. Congratulations to your mother.
2. What other superb performance/improvements may we expect?
Cheers
1. I tell her.
2. This is leading up to a major recording project next summer with the new Blackbird Rider Nylon CF guitars.
You definitely deserve your monk moniker :)
Post a Comment
<< Home