Still Pressin' Those Keys.....

Still goin strong every day, haven't missed one yet. Just finished my 2nd practice session of the day and got to thinking........I don't write in this thing enough. Even if it is essentially me talking to myself with a couple others overhearing, I gotta keep track of my progress, that's kinda the point.

Moving thru my Alfred's book pretty quickly. In the past week I've come across at least 4 blues songs and I'm loving 'em. Thinkin I may pick up a blues lesson book here in the next month or so.

Biggest issue I'm having right now is strain in my right wrist. Fell on it real hard this winter while snowboarding and it still hasn't fully healed. Trying to be careful with it, stretching it, rolling it, praying for it, etc. haha.....

Ok, bed time, job interview tomorrow......then after it's off to Best Buy to see if they have the cheap audio cables I'm looking for (Radio Shack didn't)....I just gotta remind myself to keep updating even if I can't find those cables!

Zak

One Month!

Well today marks one month into my piano journey! I've been probably averaging somewhere around 2 hrs daily and haven't yet missed a day. I've been moving thru my book: Alfred's Adult All-In-One Course pretty quickly and I'm very happy with my pace.

Today, as an experiment, without looking at or practicing them, I played a set from memory. Just had a piece of paper with the song titles and played the following continuously and in this order:

When the Saints Go Marching In (2 versions)
We Three Kings
Standing In the Need of Prayer
Alpine Melody
Alouette
Tumbalalaika
Lavender's Blue
Micael Row the Boat Ashore
Blow the Man Down
Lone Star Waltz
Cafe Vienna
Rock It Away
Cockles and Mussels....

The set lasted about 12 minutes and there were of course a few errors, but not many, it went pretty smoothly. I'm pretty proud that only a month into it and I had that many songs that I could pull from memory without practicing them, and with only a short gap before starting. Afterwards I played Lullaby and Chasing the Blues Away from memory, but I didn't have them in my set because I didn't think I had them memorized haha.....

So all in all I'm very happy with today. I'm only a month into it and making good progress. It will be very interesting to see where I'm at next year at this time.

As an aside: I've done some more research and I'm thinking I can get a decent recording setup for much cheaper so I'll be looking into that further.

Zak

First Lesson....

Well, I had my first lesson today.......she was mightily impressed that I've never had a lesson and am completely self taught. It was definitely a good feeling to know that I'm making solid progress. We started on multiple songs and lemme just say that Brahms' Lullaby gets your fingers movin all over the place!

I'm hoping to get the necessary cables to start recording this week.....only problem is the digital piano is stationary and about 50 feet from my computer soooo.....we'll see how it goes haha.......

ok back to practice.....

Zak