piano update
Aug. 31st, 2025 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaon the one hand: last time i publicposted about piano here i got such fun & lovely comments
on the other hand: surely further navel-gazy blathering on that theme would only be boring though
on the other other hand: but i am writing that kind of thing down anyway, for like, My Own Purposes, so like, idk maybe someone else would be curious to see
on the other other other hand:this is all probably incredibly cringe to watch i'm so mediocre at piano for someone who took lessons for so long sigh
synthesis: okay, this post is public rn, but i reserve the write to access-lock it at any time out of shyness/self-consciousness haha. it will probably not be interesting unless you want to hear What I Learned About Piano Today-type stuff~
* since that post from July, i've had four piano lessons and they have been super great! i'm in the very very very fortunate position where there's a piano teacher who comes into work a few days a week—i mean, you still have to pay her, but the convenience of "go to lesson in a practice room in the literal building where i work" is so nice—and she happened to have exactly one opening at a time that works perfectly for me; it's essentially my first "meeting" one day a week and it puts me in such a good mood the whole rest of the day lol.
* i was worried she'd be too specialized in teaching rank beginners and wouldn't have much to teach me, but i needn't have worried; she's clearly skilled & knows a lot & knows how to teach & also is very much a "meet you where you're at" kinda person; it feels more like, idk, a personal trainer or coaching rather than lessons per se haha. (i mean, maybe that's just what taking individual lessons as an adult is like. even when i was going through my Very Serious About Piano phase as a teen, like, the driving mood during lessons was Do Not Disappoint Teacher & my teachers were determining a lot of my repertoire, they knew what i didn't know & were choosing stuff to grow me in specific ways, etc, whereas this vibe is very much more "how can i help you." so instead of "don't disappoint teacher" it's more like "man i better have practiced enough to have some Concrete Things I Want Help On or else i'll be wasting my money" lol)
ANYWAY, yeah, my first lesson i came in with some easy bach + "Verso" and i was like "hey, idk how you wanna do this, i took lessons for roughly a decade but it's been a long time, i'm really out of practice, and my main goal is to just Get Better In General—but also yes there's this song from a video game i've been working on and it'd be great if i could play it well enough to actually perform it in a hallway at Magfest or something" and her eyes lit up like "oh you have a project! that's great! when is this convention? great, let's work on getting ready for that" and then we were off to the races—that's p much all we've been focusing on ever since
* e.g., our first lesson was just her fixing all the fingerings i was using in the first page of "Verso." HUGE value add ty based piano teacher i hadn't realized how much my fingerings were fucking me. and this most recent lesson was really picking apart very subtle physiology things that'll help me play stably & correctly at tempo—e.g. she noticed one set of chords i was tending to biff when playing uptempo, and suggested a better fingering for them, and also when i complained about how fucking hard it was to consistently nail this one little bit—i was like "it feels like i almost have to throw my wrist to the right to hit the notes consistently, but i feel like i must be doing something wrong?"—we spent time picking it apart and like, my wrist intuition was sort of right, but only b/c the position i was throwing my wrist into happened to usually roll my thumb in a specific way over the key, and focusing just on the position of the thumb & rolling onto the actual nail while doing this one specific crossing-over-of-fingers gave me much more consistent results. also i got a weird protip for learning big fast jumps: when you're practicing the specific jump, hit the note/chord you're jumping to loud and hard and fast, even if that's not how it should be played in the actual piece—something about that builds accuracy/confidence a lot faster, and then you can always hit it more delicately in the actual performance lol
* speeding the piece up feels like some sort of mechanical-engineering-stress-test kind of deal, lol, in that i'll be able to play something perfectly at x BPM, then tick it up 10 BPM and... there's all these little flubs all over the place, what in the fuck, i've never fucked up that part before, what's going on...? but then if you really focus in you notice, hm, yes i technically hit that note but it sure felt shaky/near-miss-y, what's going on there. and then you practice exactly three notes (the before-target-after note) like a billion times. and then when you play the whole passage again, suddenly all the flubs go away, because hey you fixed the little hairline crack that was causing the entire engine to fall apart via Cascading Effects.
...that does, of course, require the discipline to observe & and specifically work on the SMALLEST POSSIBLE UNIT of error... i know with my head, of course, that practicing two measures is a waste of time when it's only three notes that are the problem, and also yes you really do simply have to practice a boring thing a lot... i'm now in The Danger Zone where it's always technically possible for me to play the whole piece end-to-end, and i gotta stop myself like no!!! bad lua!!! DON'T proceed to play The Whole Rest Of The Piece YOU ARE NOT PERFORMING RIGHT NOW
* ALTERNATIVELY, there's also errors that only start popping up because playing at faster speeds causes my brain to behave differently... e.g., i was losing my mind briefly because suddenly i was hitting the totally wrong final note after a frilly fast bit in m128 that had never given me issues before, like, it's not a hard note to hit or anything like that, why in the fuck did my finger want to go there??? until i realized m128 is in fact identical to m144, but m144 ends on a different note, and since i was playing fast enough that i wasn't doing as much conscious "piloting" (it's impossible to think about Every Individual Note when you're playing at a certain speed, right), well. my brain/muscle memory/whatever decided arbitrarily which note it should end on. and it kept picking Wrong :D;;;
* it's like the thing in souls-y video games where an enemy has two different attacks, and those attacks' animations are identical until the very last second, but they're parried entirely differently so you gotta fuckin LOCK IN and PAY THE FUCK ATTENTION when it's happening
* speaking of video games. it's striking to me how much speedrunning metaphors come to mind when i'm practicing this shit lol. there are some mistakes that are minor/small enough you can keep going if need be, but there's also mistakes that are "run-ending" in the sense that, if you fucked up in a specific way, now your hand is totally out of position for the next section and there's no way to gracefully/invisibly recover from that, you're just fucked... and much like in speedrunning those high-risk-of-ending-the-run moments tend to come later rather than earlier lmao...
* another metaphor that comes to mind often: wile e. coyote, lol. more than once i've had the thought to myself "oh wow this is going great!" when i'm totally nailing a section i've been struggling with for a while... only to immediately epic-wipeout-crash in the subsequent much-easier-section because i DISTRACTED myself thinking about "wow this is good" instead of what i should've actually been thinking about lol. running-over-a-cliff-onto-thin-air energy.
* anyway. two days ago i was despairing at ever being able to play "Verso" up to tempo, but then this morning i managed to bolt through the hard section twice without mistakes (!) at very nearly the target tempo (!!!) so like. uh. did you know Practice Works, Actually
* and since "Verso" is starting to feel... not done yet, but i'm out of the "exhaustingly learning all the fingerings & Don't Hit Wrong Notes" phase and more in the "bring it to tempo + polish it + bring out the dynamics a bit more" phase... yeah, since that's coming along just fine, i decided to start learning "Renoir" this past week and it's really fun! i picked it in part just because it's a hell of a lot easier than "Verso" and it would be nice to have something to actually show for my work lol. but also i love the DRAMA of it. those opening octaves at the VERY bottom of the keyboard, mmm. scrumptious.
eventually i'd like to learn "Révérence" and "Alicia"—especially "Révérence", i adore that track—but "Révérence" is pretty long and also i suspect it's harder than it looks. i'm always tempted to learn stuff that's likely past (or sometimes just past) the limit of my abilities and i'm trying to rein that impulse in a bit, since... well, sometimes you work on a piece for two months and barely have one page sort of down and that's pretty damn dispiriting, right! that time would be better spent playing several easier pieces that you can, in fact, actually play
* though i am also hubristically starting to wonder if some stuff i previously thought of as "too hard" may be kind of achievable even with just these two months of shaking all the rust off. like, i gave a crack at "apocalypsis noctis" during the pandemic, and ended up petering out because i was like This Is Hard And I Will Never Be Able To Play It At Tempo. but i'm looking at it now and it... doesn't look as hard as i remembered? like yeah there's some obnoxious jumps and that meno mosso bit looks snarly but. you can simply Learn Jumps. you can simply Get Good
* (and in defense of at least a little bit of my hubris, i have noticed that, even though i've mostly been focusing on a couple very specific pieces... my playing of everything does seem quite noticeably improved? like i sat down and played "Rei II" from NGE cold the other day (I learned it in high school, but never memorized it, and haven't played it much since then), and the whole thing came out error-free and very beautifully expressive on the first try? maybe just luck but yeah Practice Works in many ways ig)
* AND ALSO, at some point i want to re-memorize my old party standards—i used to have "to zanarkand" and "battle with gilgamesh" down cold, but now memory has flaked them away s.t. i get about halfway through, biff a chord, and then i'm like "lol fuck i can't remember the rest of this, sorry," and it would be nice to be able to Actually Play The Whole Thing On Command again so i can be more impressive to nerds at parties haha
* and yeah i still want to pick up some new bit of classical repertoire when i stop getting nerd-sniped by all the videogamey stuff lol. just. all this takes Time and there is only so much of it haha. and also it's even HARDER for me to not try and bite off more than i can chew wrt the classical stuff so. blah
* though re: time: the other thing that's been interesting to notice is how piano practice really makes time evaporate, in a way i don't remember from any of my other piano phases in my life. even when i was somewhat seriously considering majoring in music, i remember having to be disciplined about setting a timer for myself & be somewhat deliberate about getting enough practice time in, whereas like... if i sit in front of a keyboard lately, an hour will be gone like an eyeblink without me even noticing, and i can make more than that disappear very easily so long as i don't have Life Stuff (boo Life Stuff lol). not all of that is focused practice time, some of it's just fucking around or doing random sightreading stuff, but still. it's interesting in that i think my focus has gotten worse in a lot of ways as i've gotten older but i think it's notably much better in this respect. not sure what the difference is. (though part of it may be that i do think piano is uniquely physical and learning new stuff does command all of one's attention—if i autopilot/zonk out mid-piece because i'm worrying about groceries or something, for any sufficiently difficult piece the result will be Me Fucking It Up, quickly and immediately, and thus i am incentivized to Lock It The Fuck In very quickly lol)
anyway yeah. that sure was two thousand words about Picking Piano Back Up As An Adult, please and thank you
on the other hand: surely further navel-gazy blathering on that theme would only be boring though
on the other other hand: but i am writing that kind of thing down anyway, for like, My Own Purposes, so like, idk maybe someone else would be curious to see
on the other other other hand:
synthesis: okay, this post is public rn, but i reserve the write to access-lock it at any time out of shyness/self-consciousness haha. it will probably not be interesting unless you want to hear What I Learned About Piano Today-type stuff~
* since that post from July, i've had four piano lessons and they have been super great! i'm in the very very very fortunate position where there's a piano teacher who comes into work a few days a week—i mean, you still have to pay her, but the convenience of "go to lesson in a practice room in the literal building where i work" is so nice—and she happened to have exactly one opening at a time that works perfectly for me; it's essentially my first "meeting" one day a week and it puts me in such a good mood the whole rest of the day lol.
* i was worried she'd be too specialized in teaching rank beginners and wouldn't have much to teach me, but i needn't have worried; she's clearly skilled & knows a lot & knows how to teach & also is very much a "meet you where you're at" kinda person; it feels more like, idk, a personal trainer or coaching rather than lessons per se haha. (i mean, maybe that's just what taking individual lessons as an adult is like. even when i was going through my Very Serious About Piano phase as a teen, like, the driving mood during lessons was Do Not Disappoint Teacher & my teachers were determining a lot of my repertoire, they knew what i didn't know & were choosing stuff to grow me in specific ways, etc, whereas this vibe is very much more "how can i help you." so instead of "don't disappoint teacher" it's more like "man i better have practiced enough to have some Concrete Things I Want Help On or else i'll be wasting my money" lol)
ANYWAY, yeah, my first lesson i came in with some easy bach + "Verso" and i was like "hey, idk how you wanna do this, i took lessons for roughly a decade but it's been a long time, i'm really out of practice, and my main goal is to just Get Better In General—but also yes there's this song from a video game i've been working on and it'd be great if i could play it well enough to actually perform it in a hallway at Magfest or something" and her eyes lit up like "oh you have a project! that's great! when is this convention? great, let's work on getting ready for that" and then we were off to the races—that's p much all we've been focusing on ever since
* e.g., our first lesson was just her fixing all the fingerings i was using in the first page of "Verso." HUGE value add ty based piano teacher i hadn't realized how much my fingerings were fucking me. and this most recent lesson was really picking apart very subtle physiology things that'll help me play stably & correctly at tempo—e.g. she noticed one set of chords i was tending to biff when playing uptempo, and suggested a better fingering for them, and also when i complained about how fucking hard it was to consistently nail this one little bit—i was like "it feels like i almost have to throw my wrist to the right to hit the notes consistently, but i feel like i must be doing something wrong?"—we spent time picking it apart and like, my wrist intuition was sort of right, but only b/c the position i was throwing my wrist into happened to usually roll my thumb in a specific way over the key, and focusing just on the position of the thumb & rolling onto the actual nail while doing this one specific crossing-over-of-fingers gave me much more consistent results. also i got a weird protip for learning big fast jumps: when you're practicing the specific jump, hit the note/chord you're jumping to loud and hard and fast, even if that's not how it should be played in the actual piece—something about that builds accuracy/confidence a lot faster, and then you can always hit it more delicately in the actual performance lol
* speeding the piece up feels like some sort of mechanical-engineering-stress-test kind of deal, lol, in that i'll be able to play something perfectly at x BPM, then tick it up 10 BPM and... there's all these little flubs all over the place, what in the fuck, i've never fucked up that part before, what's going on...? but then if you really focus in you notice, hm, yes i technically hit that note but it sure felt shaky/near-miss-y, what's going on there. and then you practice exactly three notes (the before-target-after note) like a billion times. and then when you play the whole passage again, suddenly all the flubs go away, because hey you fixed the little hairline crack that was causing the entire engine to fall apart via Cascading Effects.
...that does, of course, require the discipline to observe & and specifically work on the SMALLEST POSSIBLE UNIT of error... i know with my head, of course, that practicing two measures is a waste of time when it's only three notes that are the problem, and also yes you really do simply have to practice a boring thing a lot... i'm now in The Danger Zone where it's always technically possible for me to play the whole piece end-to-end, and i gotta stop myself like no!!! bad lua!!! DON'T proceed to play The Whole Rest Of The Piece YOU ARE NOT PERFORMING RIGHT NOW
* ALTERNATIVELY, there's also errors that only start popping up because playing at faster speeds causes my brain to behave differently... e.g., i was losing my mind briefly because suddenly i was hitting the totally wrong final note after a frilly fast bit in m128 that had never given me issues before, like, it's not a hard note to hit or anything like that, why in the fuck did my finger want to go there??? until i realized m128 is in fact identical to m144, but m144 ends on a different note, and since i was playing fast enough that i wasn't doing as much conscious "piloting" (it's impossible to think about Every Individual Note when you're playing at a certain speed, right), well. my brain/muscle memory/whatever decided arbitrarily which note it should end on. and it kept picking Wrong :D;;;
* it's like the thing in souls-y video games where an enemy has two different attacks, and those attacks' animations are identical until the very last second, but they're parried entirely differently so you gotta fuckin LOCK IN and PAY THE FUCK ATTENTION when it's happening
* speaking of video games. it's striking to me how much speedrunning metaphors come to mind when i'm practicing this shit lol. there are some mistakes that are minor/small enough you can keep going if need be, but there's also mistakes that are "run-ending" in the sense that, if you fucked up in a specific way, now your hand is totally out of position for the next section and there's no way to gracefully/invisibly recover from that, you're just fucked... and much like in speedrunning those high-risk-of-ending-the-run moments tend to come later rather than earlier lmao...
* another metaphor that comes to mind often: wile e. coyote, lol. more than once i've had the thought to myself "oh wow this is going great!" when i'm totally nailing a section i've been struggling with for a while... only to immediately epic-wipeout-crash in the subsequent much-easier-section because i DISTRACTED myself thinking about "wow this is good" instead of what i should've actually been thinking about lol. running-over-a-cliff-onto-thin-air energy.
* anyway. two days ago i was despairing at ever being able to play "Verso" up to tempo, but then this morning i managed to bolt through the hard section twice without mistakes (!) at very nearly the target tempo (!!!) so like. uh. did you know Practice Works, Actually
* and since "Verso" is starting to feel... not done yet, but i'm out of the "exhaustingly learning all the fingerings & Don't Hit Wrong Notes" phase and more in the "bring it to tempo + polish it + bring out the dynamics a bit more" phase... yeah, since that's coming along just fine, i decided to start learning "Renoir" this past week and it's really fun! i picked it in part just because it's a hell of a lot easier than "Verso" and it would be nice to have something to actually show for my work lol. but also i love the DRAMA of it. those opening octaves at the VERY bottom of the keyboard, mmm. scrumptious.
eventually i'd like to learn "Révérence" and "Alicia"—especially "Révérence", i adore that track—but "Révérence" is pretty long and also i suspect it's harder than it looks. i'm always tempted to learn stuff that's likely past (or sometimes just past) the limit of my abilities and i'm trying to rein that impulse in a bit, since... well, sometimes you work on a piece for two months and barely have one page sort of down and that's pretty damn dispiriting, right! that time would be better spent playing several easier pieces that you can, in fact, actually play
* though i am also hubristically starting to wonder if some stuff i previously thought of as "too hard" may be kind of achievable even with just these two months of shaking all the rust off. like, i gave a crack at "apocalypsis noctis" during the pandemic, and ended up petering out because i was like This Is Hard And I Will Never Be Able To Play It At Tempo. but i'm looking at it now and it... doesn't look as hard as i remembered? like yeah there's some obnoxious jumps and that meno mosso bit looks snarly but. you can simply Learn Jumps. you can simply Get Good
* (and in defense of at least a little bit of my hubris, i have noticed that, even though i've mostly been focusing on a couple very specific pieces... my playing of everything does seem quite noticeably improved? like i sat down and played "Rei II" from NGE cold the other day (I learned it in high school, but never memorized it, and haven't played it much since then), and the whole thing came out error-free and very beautifully expressive on the first try? maybe just luck but yeah Practice Works in many ways ig)
* AND ALSO, at some point i want to re-memorize my old party standards—i used to have "to zanarkand" and "battle with gilgamesh" down cold, but now memory has flaked them away s.t. i get about halfway through, biff a chord, and then i'm like "lol fuck i can't remember the rest of this, sorry," and it would be nice to be able to Actually Play The Whole Thing On Command again so i can be more impressive to nerds at parties haha
* and yeah i still want to pick up some new bit of classical repertoire when i stop getting nerd-sniped by all the videogamey stuff lol. just. all this takes Time and there is only so much of it haha. and also it's even HARDER for me to not try and bite off more than i can chew wrt the classical stuff so. blah
* though re: time: the other thing that's been interesting to notice is how piano practice really makes time evaporate, in a way i don't remember from any of my other piano phases in my life. even when i was somewhat seriously considering majoring in music, i remember having to be disciplined about setting a timer for myself & be somewhat deliberate about getting enough practice time in, whereas like... if i sit in front of a keyboard lately, an hour will be gone like an eyeblink without me even noticing, and i can make more than that disappear very easily so long as i don't have Life Stuff (boo Life Stuff lol). not all of that is focused practice time, some of it's just fucking around or doing random sightreading stuff, but still. it's interesting in that i think my focus has gotten worse in a lot of ways as i've gotten older but i think it's notably much better in this respect. not sure what the difference is. (though part of it may be that i do think piano is uniquely physical and learning new stuff does command all of one's attention—if i autopilot/zonk out mid-piece because i'm worrying about groceries or something, for any sufficiently difficult piece the result will be Me Fucking It Up, quickly and immediately, and thus i am incentivized to Lock It The Fuck In very quickly lol)
anyway yeah. that sure was two thousand words about Picking Piano Back Up As An Adult, please and thank you
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 03:44 am (UTC)> * another metaphor that comes to mind often: wile e. coyote, lol. more than once i've had the thought to myself "oh wow this is going great!" when i'm totally nailing a section i've been struggling with for a while... only to immediately epic-wipeout-crash in the subsequent much-easier-section because i DISTRACTED myself thinking about "wow this is good" instead of what i should've actually been thinking about lol. running-over-a-cliff-onto-thin-air energy.
Oh yeah, that's extremely familiar. I was never particularly serious about music, just played in grade school, but when I did practice this happened to me all the time.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 08:47 am (UTC)