“Dawn week 3 progress

Below is my week 3 documented progress. So far, I’m very happy with how the piece is coming! This week I focused on the parts I already knew, and wanted to bring those up to speed. I feel with the speed at which I can play the beginning is sufficient enough to move on to the next more challenging portion of the piece, where it dances way up and down the keys. Very excited about the journey to come!

This week I focused on tempo. As mentioned earlier, from repeated repetition, I’ve unconsciously memorized the beginning of the piece. It felt comfortable and rewarding to play the part which I already knew, so I only wanted to bring it up to speed. You’ll notice I’m no longer reading the sheet music and playing only from memory here. The biggest challenge for my this week was continuing to learn new parts of the song. Reading the music quickly and at speed is becoming challenging, especially with the following part of the song which implements ledger lines. Ledger lines are used when the music notes on the staff are either so high or low, they extend into a new octave and there isn’t enough space on the existing line to display how much further away they are. The ledger lines add that much more complexity to the piece and I find very much slow down my note identification progress. I invite you to view more information and graphics form the above link. These were an unanticipated aspect of learning the song for me, but looking back, they are completely necessary. The music staffs can display 11 possible notes, but there are 88 keys on a piano!