PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE

So here's one for the musicians reading this blog (which I guess are most of the people who do read it.) What I'm practicing these days. 

There are always the staples: things that I return to again and again in my practicing over years. I often play a tune slowly, ornamenting around the melody differently each time alternating between singing the phrases and playing them. This generally starts in the key that the tune is usually played in, but then I start moving by half steps to other keys, spending longer (usually) in keys that are less familiar (like B, Gb, E, A). Another thing I've been doing for years is to play a mostly 8th note line broken between both hands through a chord progression. Doing this leads into counterpoint, either with the melody or without. Along similar lines, I play left hand alone a lot--sometimes playing a line and trying to feel phrasing as lyrically as my right hand does, sometimes playing two lines over the chord changes, sometimes playing both the melody and an accompanying bass line. I also like to do simple things related to eartraining: things like playing a note and waiting for another note to suggest itself in my imagination and then finding the note, or singing a line over the chord changes while I ghost the notes in my right hand (playing "air piano" and only occasionally checking to make sure what I am singing is what I am playing.) I also have a few favorites relating to the metronome, such as at a slow tempo playing whole notes, then half notes, then half note triplets, then quarters, 5 over 4, quarter note triplets, 7 over 4, 8th notes, 9 over 4, quintuplets, and so on. I play each of these rhythmic levels and move back and forth between them, trying to feel what it feels like to be in front or behind, noticing my natural tendency to rush or drag as I switch levels and in general trying to be able to move between the levels by feeling them all (to an extent) in that original whole note. There are a lot of other staples of my practicing but these are a few of my favorites.

Lately, I am getting ready to make a solo recording, so I am working on some of the material for that. I have been particularly interested in ways of harmonizing a melody using parallel structures with exact transposition. It's interesting to compare what it's like when you move an intervallic structure diatonically (in a chord scale) and when you make the transposition exact, keeping all of the intervallic relationships the same as you move chord to chord. The second type of transposition (called chromatic planing by arrangers, at least when you move by half step, although I am interested in moving by any interval) is hard to do since I use my knowledge of chord scales to be able to move parallel structures through keys--what I mean by that is, if I don't have a chord scale in mind, it's more difficult to visualize these moving chords--for example if I have a four-note voicing comprised of (from bottom to top) a 5th, a half step and a minor 6th and I am going to move that around to follow a melody line, it's hard to keep that structure when moving quickly with a complicated melody as the top note of the voicing. Pianists often use this technique with particularly well known voicings, like the so what voicing (famously, McCoy on Inception, moving up a whole tone scale) or more recently this popular voicing--a 1st inversion triad over a note a major second below (F, G, Bb, Eb, for example). But I'd like to be able to move any voicing anywhere, so this is something I am practicing now.

One last thing is about rhythm and I'm always looking for ways to practice more of that. Two that I have been looking at are playing 2 rhythmic patterns (in an odd meter) simultaneously and playing dotted quarter rhythms in my left hand steadily against a right hand solo line in 5 or 7. 

So, those are a few things that I am working on. By now I am starting to feel that I'd better stop typing and start practicing. Hope this is helpful or at least interesting to those pianists out there...