learning piano is FREAKING hard again
Towards the end of last year, I started learning "Stay Away From My Friends" by Pierce the Veil (a freaking banger) and made amazing progress, but after a while, I got lazy and busy all at the same time, quit the lessons with my instructor, and took a break from practicing. But now I'm getting back into it and have a better relationship with playing this time around.
If you're interested, the score that I'm using is here and the composer played it on YouTube as well.
I fucked up because I learned over half the song, but now I'm realizing I have to go back and re-learn the song because my technique is sloppy. Adding the pedal to my playing shined a light on some bad habits I picked up while practicing. This fact was validated by a bunch of YouTube advice videos I saw about how you should not ignore the pedal when practicing because it will bite you later (which it did lol).
The thing I'm struggling with the most right now is playing legato, without the help of the pedal. "Playing legato" for those unaware is basically just when a note flows nicely into the next one, opposed to "staccato" where each note is played individually. Staccato sounds. kind of. like if. I spoke. like this. You can hear the space between the notes. Human speech naturally sounds very legato.
The sustain pedal keeps notes prolonged (or sustained obviously), but the problem is that if you're not learning how to play more legato without the help of a pedal, then pedaling becomes hard. For example:
2 bars from "Stay Away From My Friends." The left hand is playing a simple sequence on the bottom, and the right plays a melody on the top
This is particular problem area for me. These bars have a bunch of 8th notes, which leaves very little room to make mistakes when pedaling. You must master playing the bars legato before adding the pedal. I can't stop playing the first notes of the second bar, switching my pedal, and cutting the sound off because I pedaled too late. Which then signaled to me that I should probably just keep my fingers on the first notes, as I play the second note (at least I think...but please email me if that thinking is wrong).
The problem though is I can't apply that same logic to these bars:
Left hand is the same simple sequence, the right is playing the same E note 4 times in row in the second bar
The 2nd bar has been torture for me. The second bar plays an E (the top-most note) 5 times in a row, which means you have to lift your finger off the note so you can hit it again, obviously. Playing with the pedal goes something like:
- Play the first E and lift your foot off the pedal at the SAME time
- Press your foot back on the pedal BEFORE you lift your finger off the E
- Then lift your finger off the E to play the second E
The common advice here is just to play it slow over and over again until you get it right, and I've been doing that, but it doesn't change the fact that it's one of the harder bars I've tried to learn so far, and when sped up, I still don't have it quite down.
Obviously I'm gonna figure it out eventually, but I want to write about it because I think it's interesting how certain parts of a piece can take so much time to learn. Before these two sections, I was having issues playing 4:3 polyrhythms, which took me days to fully wrap my head around. Once you master these hard sections though, it's an amazing feeling. The same feeling I get when solving a challenging programming problem.
I don't want this post to be all negative though, so I do want to end this by saying I'm having a great time working through this piece. Cancelling my lessons with my instructor did a lot of good for my relationship with piano. Before, I was constantly panicking, thinking "oh crap I have to practice. I have a lesson next week," but now I get to practice on my own timeline, which removed all the stress of playing. I don't know if there's a lesson here, but that's my experience.
Oh and if you want to see my first rant about piano, you can read that here.