PERP Journal

So the thing that I'm focusing on is the topic of jazz. I've always been fascinated with Jazz but I never dared to pick it up. To start up my journey into Jazz, I picked to work on a piano jazz piece which is Moanin' by Bobby Timmons. There were a lot of techniques for each hand but I decided to delve into the simple stuff. One thing I realised about Jazz movement is that the bass note is often walking up or down its diatonic scale. Though the problem with my left hand is that it stays stationary at the chord it plays so I'm not used to the whole 'walking' bass thing. So I practised how to run down a scale with my left hand while playing something else on my right. I started slow then progressively got faster. After that I added more challenges like playing a different scale or maybe even adding perfect 5ths or octaves to my left hand as I play. Next thing that I went to pick up was learning the Blues scale. Though for the case of the song I was playing, I...

Long- Term Goal: I dream of reaching a point in my life where I gain a level of mastery over the instruments that I play. Right now I'm just a jack-of-all-trades,master of none, so I thought, why not aim for being able to master all right? But of course this is a goal that takes a really really long time to reach because mastery is such a big word. So I'll go with what 'mastery' means to me. To me it means being able to play my instrument with ease and instead be able to focus on the delivery of the performance consistently.  Short-Term Goal: I thought of setting my short-term goal of learning how to sight read faster because thats the bread and butter for a lot of musicians. I can read the score but I was never able to do it fast enough and I always had to stop every second to find out whats next. Plus I realised that the scores usually had more things to offer besides just chords. I can test myself every week to see whether or not I managed to read faster b...