Sunday, 13 May 2007

Always one step ahead...

It just occured to me that for this to work, I need to be posting up everything. My last post missed a very important piece of progress from the last week...

In the last lesson, Paul had my playing up, and improvising on a Pentatonic C Minor Scale here.

[FYI this is playing up, not improvising]

After a bit of fiddling, though, he issued me a challenge. Pare back the improvisation, but try and hear in your head the note you are going to play next. This proved an interesting challenge. I was not to hum the notes, only to hear them in my head. I found it really hard at first, but after trying a few times, it became a bit easier. I found myself imaging the next note. Sometimes, though, I wasn't imagining the next note in the scale - my brain was literally saying, don't go to the F, jump straight up to the G. It was really weird and hard to explain.

I think I am able to get into it much more after playing a scale a bit - getting used to where all the intervals are. After playing the funky tune mentioned in the last post a bit, I could actually 'audiovisualise' it all with my hands, but away from the piano. Again - weird - interesting - but ultimately hard to get across in text form. I'll keep practising 'hearing ahead of myself' and see if I can explain it any better.

I start my new job tomorrow, so I should really bed, but I can't resist playing something on the Pentatonic C Minor now...very short...


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