first practice sesh

A couple days ago I had my first practice with my mentor. I played through a couple of my songs and we went through them, making notes. Some of the changes we had to make involved tempo, dynamics and articulation. I was speeding through some areas so there was less musicality and shape in the song. My original dynamics were too few and hardly noticeable but now it's definitely improved. When it comes to articulation there was just a couple spots where the written in articulation didn't fit the song so we changed a few things here and there. The good thing about music is that it isn't written in stone. You can change it to your will and add your own musical flavour and essentially make the song your own. I'm looking forward to continuing with this project as I will be growing as a musician, it's nice to keep playing even though I am no longer taking lessons and not required to practice.

picking songs

One of the first things I have to do to start my project is choose songs. This will make or break my project for two reasons. The first reason is that I want to enjoy playing the songs I play as well as choose well known songs that others can appreciate as well. The second reason is that I don't want to pick anything above my skill level but make sure that they will also challenge me. I have the sheet music for a few songs already that I got from my former piano teacher but I also found another blog where I can print basic sheet music for free. Here's the link: http://pianolicious.blogspot.ca/ I've started practicing and I hope to have a video up as soon as possible, however, I will be gone for a little while because I am going on a mission's trip with my school so that might delay things a little bit.