Lee - an adult beginner

lzp11 wrote:

hellene wrote:

lzp11 wrote:
Lee, the tempo set is better then ideal! We won't have to be that way! Any reasonable tempo will do.

You see, there is no limit of perfectness, but if we are just students with the ultimate goal to get through as many music texts as possible and enjoy it as much as we can, at some point we sould put some lid on our efforts.

I don't believe that your dream is to swap your doctor's job to concert pianist any time soon! So, don't worry about 150. Let's make it 100, or 90

Lol - you are absolutely right Hellene - I don't think I'll be giving up the day job just yet

This is very good news and very sensible - otherwise I will be playing this same piece for the next 10 years!

Well, with 'traditional' method everything has to be just perfect, regardless... Many teachers afraid to display their students and embarrassed to play themselves being extremely aggressive towards imperfection. The rout of this behavior is the past, when we didn't have recording technology and we had only live music. Playing perfect was motto, because musician had to be always prepared to recite for others.
Today we have different goal. If we want to hear master, we listen to them using different devices. We are making music for our own pleasure mostly. Our goal is to develop reading skills and go through a many pieces as possible. Of cause we can perfect some pieces that we like the most, but it is our own choice.

I am getting just a tad irritable with myself though, because as I speed up and add metronome I find that I'm now starting to make small timing errors when playing, so I'll look up to find that the game has stopped many bars before where I have got to. I can hardly tell what I'm doing wrong - it's probably lifting a finger too early or holding one down for too long - it is very difficult to hear any difference when playing!

Play by heart! It is perfectly OK now.

I saw your post about the order of practice and I could now play without the computer (with and without metronome) - do you think this is the best next step or should I be still trying trying to play with the computer?

No, play by heart, record yourself on video and let's put icing on the cake - I will help you to polish the piece.

lzp11 wrote: I have been very quiet on the site lately - mainly because I start back to work this Thursday and so I've been busy studying and preparing

I'm also in mourning for the loss of time with them, which I have enjoyed so much

So, it is definitely a stressful transition back from maternity leave although I do work part time (3 days a week) but this will certainly put a lot of additional pressure on my time and I hope it will not get in the way of too much of the early learning work that I've been doing with my kids.

I have still been playing the piano as much as possible (but not as much as before). Here is my latest version of March - Nutcracker suite. It's a tempo of around 100 played by memory (no computer). It's certainly not my best ever attempt - I find the process of recording quite stressful and I even get shaky hands! But it would take forever otherwise so here it is:

I've also been playing the Boogie 1 album and have got through all the songs. I practiced for sight reading but also continued to polish most a bit more than this so I could play at a reasonable speed with few errors.

I would like to polish 'March' but I think I would like to start working on a new piece to practice my technique. Possibly a little less challenging but still stretching me a bit - Hellene - do you have some suggestions please?

Also, what would be the next steps for sight reading practice (i have sight read the nursery rhymes primer, classics primer and boogie 1)?