What are ya’ll working on at the moment?

[elwoods]

Hello everyone. I’m curious to know what you’re working on (and how long you’ve been at it.)

Personally, since coming back a few weeks ago after a very long break, I’m working on Misty (yeah, I couldn’t remember it at all). It’s coming easier this time around, but I’m going very slow. I’m not that great at remembering each note of each chord so I’m playing only with the fractions, not the keyboard diagram, so I have to find each note. It hurts my brain a bit, but I can feel it helping. When I’m feeling in fine form I try to transpose it for a few bars.

Otherwise, I recently learned a trick to play major pentatonic scales in different keys in RH (while playing correlating Rb7 on left) up and down a few octaves but in bunches, so color tones 1,2,3,5;
2,3,5,6; 3,5,6,1; 5,6,1,2; 6,1,2,3

This is really helping visualize the keys much better, and hopefully will help me play riffs better for blues playing, for example.

Finally, I’m also playing from some lead sheets 2 voice chords in left hand (like with Misty) and just the melody in the right, to get that ingrained, before starting to make my own arrangements…

And you guys?
Elwood

[Don Viator]

Hello Elwoods,
I was away from a piano for a while and now am back. I’m working on songs I played before and now relearning them. Misty, When I fall in Love, Autumn Leaves, Unforgettable, and Tenderly. I look at other sites but always return to Sudnow. The other sites seem to reinforce what Suds says.

[David Haynes]

Believe it or not, I have returned to ‘Misty’ after pretty much ignoring it for over a decade.

Two reasons: It just seemed odd for me, as the ersatz leader of this little endeavor, to not have Misty well in hand at all times. And two, having sorta recently finished Sudnow’s second version of “Ways of the Hand”, I was struck by two things he said about singing (or scatting) along with your playing and physically moving and swaying in a way that expressed the mood of your playing. Misty just seemed like the proper vehicle for this bit of investigation.

Elwood, if you’ll pardon me for slipping into a more pedagogical mode, I’d strongly encourage you to work through your lead sheets figuring out full voicings. It’s tedious but it’s a shorter distance to where you want to go.

[elwoods]

Hi David. I totally agree, I am working mainly on full voicings, the other stuff just helps me get the notes of each key under my grip, and is speeding up me finding the voicings.

As per my comment on my practice with lead sheets, playing the LH Sudnow voicings and only melody in RH once through before launching into the arrangements is because sometimes I get lost finding the full voicings and lose where I am concerning the melody, and hearing the chords in LH and melody gives me a better feel for the song. That was my reasoning anyway. I’ll try just jumping in.

thanks

[David Haynes]

Elwoods,
Yup. Been there (and still visit regularly). It really is mainly about lots of repetitions – your hands are learning, it’s just hard to tell for a while. Most of us aren’t obsessive enough to flatten out the learning curve much.

[Author]

Posts