#6: Old Habits

So you'd think after complaining last week about my fingers hurting I would try to prevent that from happening, but no. I'm very sad to admit that I did not practice as much as I would of liked to this week. I did have quite a few things going on, but I definitely could of practiced more. I really hope that when school starts that I'll practice a lot more instead of falling into my old habits and not really practicing much until winter time. I blame the sun (just because I feel like it). I really like to walk. I'll walk around my neighborhood 2-3 times, listening to my iPod because it's relaxing. The only problem is I can't practice while I'm walking, although I do usually listen to my practice songs at least once. Maybe the key is to play in the sunlight. I can sit on my back deck and practice tempo and work on my tan.

I did practice some though. I tried to make somewhat of a makeup session at my grandma's for the duet. First, I started with dynamics. i looked over the song to see if I remembered all the markings then started playing. The first run through wasn't terrible but the fortes and pianos could of been exaggerated a lot more. When I went onto the repeat, things basically went down hill. I started having difficulties with tuning, shifting, and the dynamics were terrible. Really that second time through had no dynamics. I worked through each problem for some time then tried it all together again. Everything seemed to go better... besides the dynamics. Each time I start the repeat the term dynamics seems to disappear from my vocabulary. So without a doubt I'm going to have to work diligently at those contrasting fortes and pianos. The next task I set out for myself was to speed it up. I brought the whole piece to 80 bpm, which went okay. The beginning went a lot smoother at the faster tempo than the second half, but I was expecting that. I am proud to say that I was behind only a couple times. I'm still having some problem areas which did contribute to the mess ups in tempo. Actually most of these problems are in the second half, so I guess that's also something I'm going to really work at.

Hopefully I do better at practicing this upcoming week (feel like deja vu?). I'm really going to need to step it up since orchestra camp is in two weeks (SO EXCITED!!!).