After my latest rant on reading music, I took a well-deserved break for a couple days. Upon returning to practice, I found that my focus had shifted from reading written music and the fingering exercise I practice to a metronome.
Currently I’m still all about the fingering exercise for challenge and warmup, but now I’m also playing memorized songs with the intention of playing with more efficient fingering, using my ring finger more, and playing to a beat.
As for written music, I haven’t given up on it, but rather than going through lessons from a book or video and stumbling through sheet music, for now I am improvising simple songs and using http://noteflight.com to write them down. The process of doing that is keeping learning creative and allowing me to discover some of the more detailed aspects of written music on my own.
The fingering exercise has been frustrating to me. My goal is to learn the next one in the series of 60 when I can play the one I’m working through at double-time 160bpm in smooth velocity and without any full-on trainwrecking.
It’s going slowly, however I’ve discovered that playing to music versus a metronome made a huge difference for me this morning. Here’s double-time 120bpm all the way up the keyboard (two more octaves than specified in the book).
That’s more along the lines of where I’d like to be. Now to get it about 40bpm faster.