Saturday

Piano:

20 Minutes Scales (at correct tempo for Grade 3.)

20 Minutes Bergonzi all permutations on Lady Duck and On the Brink at 60 bpm.

20 Minutes Neat Feet. All traditional metronome markings from 60-100bpm, ironing out a few reading errors as I get more comfortable with the piece.

30 Minutes Ted Pease Composition exercises.

20 Minutes Scales.

30 Minutes Bergonzi: Lady Duck 1234/1345 and the three permutations. I did one chorus of each at 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120 bpm and then played along to the CD four times - one for each permutation and then moved into mixing it up a little and improvising using these notes.

30 Minutes more Bergonzi. On the Brink permutations 60-100bpm

(Almost) A week on....

I can't believe it has been nearly a week since my last blog entry. Although I haven't been spending much time blogging I have managed to get quite a few hours of practice in!

Today I spent about an hour at the piano:

20 mins - Bob Mintzer Etude 1. I concentrated on the second half of the piece, particularly the right hand part. I can now just about get through the whole thing at a modest 40 bpm.

20 Mins - Reinecke. I am now running the whole piece through at five metronome markings per session. Last time I ran from 40bpm up to 48. Today was 42bpm up to 50 and so on. I run the piece several times at each tempo (trying not to look at my hands so much.)

10 Mins - Scales. A, D and G major with both hands together over two octaves. I'm still finding this tricky!

10 Mins - Biehl piece at five tempos from 76 up to the marked tempo of 92.

Tomorrow is probably my last Wednesday off as my teaching is starting to pick up. I intend to make the most of it by getting stuck into a third Grade 2 piece and trying to work the full Mintzer Etude up to speed.

15 Minutes Composition - I intend to go through some of the exercises in the Ted Pease Jazz Compositon Theory and Practice. I did a lot of this earlier in the year but I'm a bit rusty so I need to get back into the swing of things.

I've clocked up a fair bit of drum kit practice recently. This feels good but I still want a set of Roland V Drums to practice on at home!

A new CD arrived in the mail today courtesy of Amazon. I've been on a bit of a Michael Brecker trip recently so I ordered his first album. I'm especially enjoying the tune "Choices" which I used to play in a band ten years ago when I was at college. Its nice to hear it played properly!