October 8th 2010 - From disaster to new encouragement!

How often my good intentions evaporate! For all sorts of reasons I just did not get on with much serious, regular practice, and by the middle of this week my next lesson was looming! What on earth was I going to say?
Before I beat myself up totally, however, I  spent some time reflecting on what I had achieved, and found I could tick off most of what I had been asked to do! Phew!!!!
The advantage of writing this Blog is that I can check up on myself, review what I have set myself and identify achievements. When I did so this morning, the day of my lesson, I discovered I had actually spent quite a bit of time on theory!

• Degrees - re-visited
• Scale pattern - revisted and revised
• Order of sharps - revised
• Key intervals : tonique, Dominante, Sensible (l     V     Vll) fixed in my head
• Streets of London - key revised (good old Chordie.com)
• My Grandfathers' Clock - key revised ( like-wise thanks to Chordie.com)
• Lots of listening to Va Savoir, a wonderful French classic I want to add to my repertoire.
• A Scat exercise transposed into two different keys.

All in all I was greatly comforted. My lesson itself was really constructive too.

Main discussion

• Noted the order of flats and how to work out which key apiece of music is in
• Revised work on Relative Minor keys, and how to identify whether a piece of music is in its relative minor or principal key. This was prompted by a piece of music I had bought and transposed via 'Scorch' before printing. It was in CMajor, but had so many incidentals in the score I wondered whether it was in fact in the relative minor of Aflat. We decided that it was in C, and couldn't understand the strange transposition! The main thing, however ws that the notes worked, and it suits my voice perfectly.
• Started talking about Blues, the' blues note' and the Pentatonic minor

My tasks for the coming fortnight

• Experiment with the Blues material on the keyboard - use an F chord in the left hand, and play about with different sequences of the degrees :      l      iii    lV  V   Vll
• Make sure I can play the new chords in Streets of London and sing the song well
• Make sure I've addressed the best breathing points for me in Grandfathers' Clock
• Write out the key signatures of the different keys, noting  the tonique, dominant and Sensible notes ( l  V  Vll)

Monday October 17th

I've not done a great deal, as usual! The days go by so quickly and other activities crowd in. It's not that I am un-motivated, just ill-disciplined! 

• Shortly after my lesson, I sat at the keyboard to work on the relative minors. That was fun, especially once I realised how to play a scale using the relative minor with the original key! What a revelation.
• I have  found a brilliant piece of software for writing music. It's called Musescore and it is a free download. So I have had some fun learning how to use this. 
• Yesterday was a great session. I spent time working on the revised chords for Streets of London. Transposing it into Bflat minor means I have to learn the Bflat and Eflat chords. These are barre chords in the A shape. It is a question of learning the shape and then getting the fingers to obey - they don't want to. Still it is coming and I am gradually starting to change the chords and hum the tune provided I do it SLOWLY! I don't think I'll be able to sing it and play it all by the next lesson, but at least I have made some progress. It is a much better key for my voice, so once I have mastered these chords I shall have some excellent new resources to use.
•  Grandfathers' clock is coming along well and I'm beginning to experiment with the finger picking style too.  Yesterday I found a great way of making the strings sound like a ticking clock.

I hope today I'll play around with the blues chords....... we'll see!