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Written by Greg Shoemaker

Category: Practice Blog - Greg Shoemaker

Published: 30 May 2020

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I haven't posted anything in this blog in a while although I did write  Introduction to Comping a little over a week ago.  My practice has suffered somewhat because I have been spending time rearranging my studio and trying to learn how to set up and use my new mixer.  You can read about that in on my personal studio blog if you're interested.  That doesn't mean I haven't been practicing.  I have had my weekly drum lessons and Denis got me started on fills. I spent around an hour practicing that tonight while trying to get levels set correctly on the mixer and I will start recording some tomorrow.  As far as the piano goes, on May 18th I was looking through book two of the Well Tempered Clavier which Shanxi, my oldest daughter, gave me as a Christmas present in 2018.  As I played through parts of several of the fugues I was especially attracted to Fugue #14 in F#m and have decided to try and learn it (p0365).  I have had a few good practices but it's nowhere near a reasonable performance standard.

In learning this piece I have been applying my usual practice technique of Starting From the End. To describe my practice on I may have played through the complete piece at least once at a reasonably slow speed but I have been focusing on the last two pages because of the prevalence of 16^th notes starting at measure 36 that are mostly absent in the first two pages of the piece.  Chances are I will continue working on this piece through the month of June and will be pulling several examples out of it to demonstrate some of the drilling techniques that I use so look forward to seeing those in the coming weeks.  I may also add a new blog category for my projects in an effort to be better organized so that progress on specific pieces can be more easily followed.  My plans for tomorrow are to go ahead and record a rhythm track on the drums and use that as a foundation for improvisation that may turn into a short composition.  Until next time keep practicing.

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Written by Greg Shoemaker

Category: Practice Blog - Greg Shoemaker

Published: 02 May 2020

Hits: 2007

Now that I have finished my non-music coursework for this semester I am much more relaxed and ready to focus more on my music.  Although I practice something every day for at least 30 minutes to an hour it has been a couple of weeks since I have had an extended practice session and felt free to do some improvisational explorations and exercises.  Although I have written elsewhere about the non-traditional nature of my piano study I think it's worth repeating that I spent a long time trying to learn pieces that were too difficult for me and ended up ignoring stuff that appeared too simple.  About five years ago I made a decision to spend time reviewing the basics, primarily in regards to theory with a focus on Bach, but also to a lesser extent with regards to piano technique.  Among my collection of musical scores is a book I apparently picked up in Singapore called "Teacher's Choice For The Young Pianist"  It contains pieces that I feel I should be able to read without too much difficulty, several by sight at close to speed.  This morning I spent about an hour looking at one of the pieces in there, "Scotch Reel" paying particular attention to the left hand pattern.  Harmonically, the progression is |: I | V⁷ | I | V-I :||: I-V⁷/ii | ii-V⁷ :|  (|:F - | C⁷ - | F | C - F :||: F  D⁷/F^# | Gm C⁷ :|).  The meter is in 2/4 and my focus was on developing speed in playing the piece.  As I was working on that I realized that the two progressions used voicings that I consider to be basic comping patterns for my left hand to use when improvising and proceeded to practice them in several keys using the recommended fingering in order to get comfortable playing them in any key where I'm presented with one of those two progressions. I varied the rhythmic pattern from a pair of eighth notes to a sixteenth followed by a dotted eighth and the reverse, a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth. I probably spent thirty or forty minutes doing that before getting a little burned out on that exercise.  I then proceeded to play through what I consider to be a warm up piece - the Bach Cm prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier followed by the C^# major prelude.  I then spent a little bit of time going through the first Promenade in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition before going back to read through a couple of the simpler pieces in the Alfred's Classic Editions "Teacher's Choice" book.  I then worked on some flatted third to major third left hand comping exercises using a variation of a broken chord pattern within the context of a 12 bar blues I - IV - I - V - IV - I.  I think I started the pattern in F and may have moved to E but eventually I worked myself around to C# because I wanted to work on right hand improvisation in that key using a blues scale (C#, E, F#, G, G#, B, C#) throwing in the Major 3rd occasionally (F).  As I was getting around to writing this up as an initial posting I decided to see how I could play the left hand progression that was my initial exercise from the Alfred's Classic book on the guitar and it is workable.  As a way to make all this more accessible to whoever is reading it I would be great for me to video the practice session and make transcriptions including guitar tab for any guitarists who are interested in doing this as a finger picking (or flat picking) pattern but that will take some time to get set up.  Perhaps I could demonstrate it as a topic once I get my live streaming show going but it's a matter of the amount of scheduling time to support that particular project.  My purpose in writing this here is simply to describe how a typical practice session for me goes.

The other thing I wanted to do was to list the pieces and exercises I have been working on recently.  In addition to the piece from the Alfred book they include the following:

• Satin Doll  (Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer)
• Mazurka #13, Op. 17 No. 4 (Chopin)
• Random exercises from Creative Jazz Improvisation (Scott Reeves)
• Fugue #21 from the Well Tempered Clavier (Bach)
• They Can't Take That Away From Me (Gershwin)
• Sonata #31 K. 263 (Domenico Scarlatti) - I haven't decided if I will spend a lot of time on this yet.
• Pictures at an Exhibition {Promenade, Gnomus, Vecchio Castello} (Mussorgsky)

I will probably also start spending some time with Arkansas Traveler and some other fiddle tunes as well as doing some exercises on the trumpet.  Now that I am almost finished with my first semester back in school I will be working to get my studio set up and developing my online presence throughout the summer along side my practice so look for more in the weeks ahead.

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Written by Greg Shoemaker

Category: Practice Blog - Greg Shoemaker

Published: 03 May 2020

Hits: 2104

I woke up this morning at 4:00 because I couldn't sleep so I went down to the studio and spent the next 3 1/2 hours practicing.  About 40 minutes was with the Nitro working on Groove #1 slow in the Tommy Igoe's Groove Essentials.   I was using the metronome on the Nitro at a speed of 76.  I will eventually get around to making a video demonstrating the metronome on the Nitro as well as a review of the set that I will post on the other site but what I have come to really like about this is that the display on the control module will show whether you are playing on the beat, ahead of the beat, or behind the beat.  This morning I was focusing mostly on variation B in the exercise because my instructor has made it clear that my overall set drumming progress will be much faster once I master the kick drum sixteenth notes on the last quarter of the second and third beats in this variation.  I then proceeded to work on various sections of the Bach fugue (#21) in B^b.  I still don't have it memorized completely but after working on it for around 2 1/2 hours I went back to sleep.  Later today I decided to begin using the metronome with it so that I could iron out places where I have some rhythmic inconsistencies and identify the sections that have the most problems.  I am now working on it with the quarter note set to about 54 as that speed is the fastest I can reasonably execute the right hand passage in measures 24 and 25.  That was essentially my practice for today although I did play through the first page and a half of Satin Doll from memory.