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.