Little Boat

This is yet another jazz song that I was learning recently. But it isn't really more than you should be doing. I'm always telling you that you should be listening, and if you play anything then you should be playing too. Which reminds me of something I want to tell you about practicing.

As you probably know, as long as I'm playing the songs, which I am doing, I can't just be churning out songs and have them actually sound right without putting some time into practicing piano. But, I have done it, I have read about it and I have heard people talking about it, and some things seem to say, "You can spend 5 hours doing it this way or you can spend 30 minutes doing it that way, and you'll get the same thing out of it."



If you play an instrument, don't feel like you don't know how to practice efficiently. I'm not trying to say that anyone isn't good because they're doing something I'm talking about. I'm just telling you about what I noticed and maybe it'll help you.

It seems like you should have a plan for the time you're spending playing. Not sure about that? Well, look at it. If you sit down to play something and you have no idea what you're going to do, your little boat just ends up drifting away. You start playing this song you learned and maybe you start a new one, but you forget about it the next day.

They say that you should make a plan and write it down so you remember it. You should also have things that you want to get done over a longer period of time. For example, "I want to learn all 20 songs in this book by the end of the year." Then you'd break that down into smaller pieces until you are, for example, learning the first part of that song today, and starting the second one tomorrow..... so by the end of the year you'll have learned all the songs.

But sometimes, it's hard to plan a course for your little boat when you say that you want to be able to play scales fast.... eventually. Then, you'd have to think about things that would help you play scales fast, and you could say that today you'll play it at this speed, then tomorrow you'll play it a little bit faster.....

So, as you can see, your boat won't reach its destination as fast unless you know what you're doing and you stick to your plan. And this doesn't just apply to playing songs. Sometimes I forget to write my post when I have more time available to do it. Then, I have to use the little time left before Wednesday morning to get it ready.

And of course, as with some of the other things I say in my posts, I'm working on doing this as well. So maybe you can listen to this while I head over to the piano and play that song I'm working on...?