PERP Journal

1. The first image is the Hanon finger exercise that I used to help improved the my left hand's finger strength. I realised after talking to Erica that changing the rhythm of the exercise is much more effective in helping to increase my left hand's dexterity rather than modifying the exercise to isolate different fingers. I realise as I start getting used to the exercise, I tend to rush a lot because my left hand speeds up and because of that I lose tempo. I also realise that I panic a lot when I lose focus and this causes me to screw up the whole exercise generally so I tend to focus on staying calm throughout the whole process too.  2. My solo piece is Victor's Piano solo which are the two images above. As you can see there is a lot of movement for the left hand throughout the whole piece. This is something I'm not used to because I only stuck to pop songs in the past. But I chose to challenge myself by picking a piece that f...

1.For my selected solo piece I picked 'Victor's Piano ' from the Corpse Bride movie. Because I liked the scene so much that it just stuck in my mind. 2. The technical part which I have difficulty with is the left hand parts where it starts to play the scales part really fast and I realised that my hands are both unable to keep up or have the strength to press the keys with ease as my left hand progresses through the piece. 3. For my technical piece, i decided to search online and found Hanon's finger exercises and went through with the exercises 4. For my musical development I do my exercises at least once a day by using hanon's exercise as a warmup and practising my solo piece on top of that.I tried to put accents on different fingers of my left hand like the 3rd and 4th as I play the exercise or maybe even modify the exercise to revolve around my individual fingers . I also tried to play dominants with the exercise to help stretch the fingers. I also realis...

1. How can I continue further from this experience? 2. Honestly I'm quite happy with how I came out from the performance because I really tried to find ways to arrange my playing so that it filled in the empty space which the electric guitar would usually fill. Instead of going my usual route of just plucking the bass note all the way, I used arrangements like the walking bass and small riffs here and there whenever it came to transitioning to different parts of the song or filling it spaces with small melodies while supporting the band. 3. Lots of practises with the bass (I'll take pictures next time) 4. I realised for this week how important band chemistry is. Because it really really helps progress the band forward because there isn't much conflicting of ideas and at the same time its like everyone is in sync with one another. Based on my experience and from what I see in other bands, band chemistry is a very powerful thing which I believe alone just by itself can...

1. Question of the Week Where did I go wrong? I figured out where I went wrong and it was in the objective of the presentation. I was suppose to focus on only one topic that was one in itself rather than a topic which could branch out to many other subtopics. Like for example I could've picked Guitar Picking efficiency or left hand efficiency or a certain piano technique or something like that. But the one I had just included too many factors and not to mention the wording of the objective was pretty wrong. Rather than learning a genre it was more of learning a song. 2. My Music Development Although I did mess up I still felt like I grew more in terms of understanding my type of learning. Because although in the end all I did was song-learning, I'm able to learn how to play songs more efficiently in a much shorter span of time. An example, rather than play chords, I'm able to pick out melody lines or learn counter melodies. Not only that, I get to learn new techniques...

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...