take piano lessons to improve my playing

When I first looked at the sheetmusic, it didn`t look too complicated. But wow, it`s complicated. But fun! I just have to learn this slooooowly.

some seriously difficult stuff right now. Basically it`s 2-5-1 progressions in a and b positions, with 9 and 13, if that tells anybody anything. After half an hour of trying to figure it all out at the pinanolesson, my head was spinning. My teacher wrote down exercises for me in all the scales. And then said “OK, go home and learn this, and we`ll meet again in year 2012”. But then he said it`s not actually as difficult as it seems in the beginning, it becomes automatic after a while if I pracice it every day. This is the kind of stuff that isn`t really fun to practice though, so I really need to use some willpower to practice it every day so I get somewhere with it pretty fast. The pianoteacher says that once I know this, it opens up a world of fun opportunities with any song I want to play, which does sound nice! Off to practise now.

I`m learning some really cool stuff at them moment. I can`t really explain it in English, but it`s about replacing the first note in a chord with the nineth, and putting the third or seventh at the bottom of the chord. At which point, all the cool tension notes are very easy to add, and it`s easy to move to other chords in fives, which makes it sound really nice. I have to do a lot of thinking all the time to do this, but it`s fun! Plus, I`m understanding more and more of the structure of music while learning this, which is really interesting.
^{I`m sure the explanation above has no meaning at all in English, but either way, it`s fun stuff!;)}

And the pianoteacher said I keep getting better at analyzing chords, yay! Progress! But then he asked me about some scales, and my respons was something in the direction of ehhh, hmm, ehhh, I`m supposed to know that, right? My pianoteacher is brilliant and incredibly inspiring, but not very structured, so he never asks me to practice scales or things like that in any sort of systematic way. So I guess I should try to be a little bit structured on my own and practice that in addition to the fun stuff.

I`m really struggling with rythm these days. I`m playing a song that didn`t seem too hard when I first looked at it. But the rythm is impossible. There are several different kinds of triolas in the same song (I could explain this better in norwegian, by different kinds I mean quarters, eights and sixteenths) combined with a normal 4/4 rythm, back and forth. It`s driving me nuts. My pianoteacher was very nice about me being completely confused, and he said what we`re doing is quite advanced rythm reading, and I`ve only been playing for a little more than a year, so I`m not at any kind of an advanced level.So I guess I should expect to be confused by it all. Still. It`s frustrating!

Week goal: at least 30 minutes ever day

Tuesday: lesson + about 40 minutes pracice
Wednesday: 35 minutes
Thursday: 30 minutes
Friday: 5 or 10 minutes, not enough at all
Saturday: nothing. Ops.
Sunday
Monday

And it was so much fun! I have hardly had the time and energy to practice at all this summer. I tried practicing a little this last week, but it was feeling a bit more like chore than fun. But the lessons are so much fun, so I`m feeling my piano enthusiasm coming back! Yay! My goal is to practice at least 30 minutes every day this week.

That concluded my first year of pianolessons (musiclessons follow the school year from august to june here). It`s been such an exiting journey! And although I`m still very much a beginner, I do play a lot better now than I did when I started in august.
Now, my challenge is to keep up the practising. 2 months without lessons is a long time, I`ll forget a lot if I don`t keep it up on my own.

and enjoying it! After some weeks when I just couldn`t find the energy/time/initiative to practice and lessons was mostly about feeling bad about my lack of progress, I`m now once again really enjoying my lessons! I`m working on “just the way you are” and “alice in wonderland” at the moment (the bill evans version, which I love), it`s very challenging and lots of new stuff, but fun!
Now I just need to work on my weakest point, which is finishing what I start. ;) I tend to start new songs full of enthusiasm, enjoy them for a while, and then get enthusiastic about some new song and start practising that before I have really made that last finish of the first ones to play them really well. Going to snap out of it now, and not give up on these two songs before I can really play them very well.

I had planned to do a lot of practising today. Instead I`ve managed to spend almost an entire day obsessing over the guy first not e-mailing me, and then not answering to my reply e-mail when he did. Plus getting superexited about the whole thing, and then worrying about poodle-related-dating-embarrasment. No practising at all. Sigh.