Day 5: Practice practice practice...

March 16th is a very special day to me. Not only is it my brother's birthday, but this year it is also the day of my state's All State Orchestra auditions. I was kind of mentally freaking out about it yesterday because I couldn't get a clean sound and a lot of my notes were out of tune. This audition song is so difficult D:

Today my sound was better. Before I began practicing I applied some rosin (kind of like a bow-polisher) onto my bow, which didn't affect the sound significantly, but it did help somewhat. Also, yesterday I went over the whole song really slowly, which probably contributed to the less sloppy sound I produced today. Since I was much more motivated to practice today, I actually finished practicing early than usual because I didn't waste so much time. 

I plan to further practice today after I finish my homework, because I have much less homework than usual :D I really need the practice; not only for the solo piece, but also for scales and sight-reading. Not to mention that I have a competition next month and I need to practice the two songs for that...

Day Three: Tuning My Piano!

So today my piano got tuned for the first time in five years. Of course, it was severely out of tune. To save money, my family decided that instead of pitching everything up to the standard 440 calibration, we would instead tune everything in relationship to the middle A. That meant that the notes individually were not in tune, but they were the correct pitch intervals between each other.

It was kind of embarrassing when the tuner finished and I had to test out the piano. I haven't had a lesson for four years and the only thing I practice these days are Lady Gaga covers. So I went up to the piano and played the main melody of Fur Elise by Beethoven and struggled with the second part of it. Then I played the first slow part of Sonata Pathetique by Beethoven (I self-taught myself the first half of the first movement) and decided not to even attempt the extremely fast part to avoid utter humiliation. The tuner said "Good job" to me and told me to practice every day, and I nodded thinking "hahalolok".

But now my piano is beautiful again, I think I'm going to practice more seriously than just experimenting with chords for my covers. I'm going to get out the music for Pathetique and practice more thoroughly, especially my right hand for the fast part. I'm also going to get fluent in Fur Elise again. It's not really that hard of a piece, but I need to be able to solidly know at least one song before I can consider myself a piano player.