Episode 23 - Finding Time

welcome to show 23 . Thank you for taking the time to listen . If this is the first time you've heard the podcast , I hope you enjoy what's here . Let me know if you're learning the piano , like I am , or another musical instrument , and let me know how you're going with it . You can contact me at david at pianofinallyshow and if you're a returning listener .

Thanks very much for coming back . It has been an interesting week for the podcast . I got a couple of emails from people saying hello and commenting about the show . Thank you very much for getting in touch . I also received a message from one of the piano course companies offering the opportunity for an interview .

I'm going to look into that and I'll let you know what is happening once I've checked their product out properly . The number of followers on my various social media accounts has increased hugely over the past week , mostly from people I work with . Hello to all of you . You know who you are . I hope you continue enjoying the show .

During my last lesson , I spoke with Devi , my piano teacher , about the Adele song and performing it . Next year we spent most of the lesson looking at the music and analysing it . Devi showed me a way of working through the piano piece and turning it from the sheet music into a version that mapped the chords in their different forms .

Then we worked on the fingering and I've been practising it this week . It is much simpler than I thought and although I still have to work on getting better at hands together , I think it is definitely doable . So I'll be saying yes to the performance , although there's still a lot to

be organised before it happens . I've mentioned before that I have a subscription to Deutsche Grammophon's Stage Plus streaming service , and this week's suggestion comes from there . They're about to start streaming Fabian Muller's eight performances covering all the Beethoven piano sonatas , but in the meantime , there are plenty of great piano performances to watch .

While I've been putting together this week's episode , I've been watching and listening to a concert from Turin with Grigori Sokolov playing pieces by Mozart , beethoven and other composers . The concert opens with two Mozart sonatas and a Fantasia , followed by two Beethoven sonatas .

Works by Schubert , chopin , rameau , schumann and Debussy all round out the concert , which runs to 140 minutes . As you would expect from a Deutsche Grammophon production , the sound quality is excellent , but there's something extra .

I've been watching a lot of live performances recently , and the one thing that can be somewhat annoying is the sounds coming from the audience . In some cases , the concerts sound as if they were recorded in a respiratory diseases hospital ward .

In this concert , either the Italian audience is incredibly healthy or the DG engineers have successfully mostly filtered out most of the audience contributions to the performance . I hope it's the former , but I suspect it's the latter . The video production is great too .

There are six or seven different camera angles , but the director has chosen to use shots where you can see Mr Sokolov's hands on the keyboard quite clearly , where you can see Mr Sokolov's hands on the keyboard quite clearly . The very opening shots as Mr Sokolov makes its way to the stage really set the scene and , of course , the performance itself is world-class .

To watch the performance you need a paid subscription to the Stage Plus service , but there are quite a few concerts and other productions available for free , including another one by Grigory Sokolov in which he plays Purcell , mozart and some others . I certainly recommend giving the stage plus a try and Grigori Sokolov's performances a watch .

Learning to play the piano takes time , lots of time . As you know , I watch a lot of pianists on YouTube and even those who seem to have made it to the highest level are still practicing and refining their playing , even after decades of professional success .

So , despite the promises of some YouTubers and piano scam artists , learning to play the piano is not something that you will be done with overnight . Can you find the 10 or more years needed to become a reasonably proficient pianist ? Well , probably . Unless you're aiming to become a concert pianist , learning to play will be one of those things .

You'll fit around the other things going on in your life . If you've seen the movie Groundhog Day , you'll know that if you give something enough time , you can make amazing progress . The problem is not finding the years that are needed to progress . The problem is finding the small amount of time each day to make incremental improvements .

There is a meme that says that if you make a 1% improvement every day for a year , you will be 37 times better than when you began . 37.7 being 1.01 to the power of 365 . Being 1.01 to the power of 365 .

Of course , the idea is fine , but the details are rubbish If I start the year only being able to play a five-finger scale and end being able to play a 16-bar piece with both hands . Is that 37 times better ? How would you measure something artistic being 30 times better ?

In any case , the maths might be dodgy , but I think everyone acknowledges that regular daily practice is the most effective way to learn things , including the piano . This is something I've been adjusting since I started at the beginning of the year and I think I'm up to about version 27 by now .

I need to find a block of time 20 to 30 minutes that I can reliably have available to sit down and practice . But just having the time available isn't enough . It has to be the right sort of time . Nearly everyone has a busy life .

I'm sure that there are some people who have time to sit around and do very little , but I'm not one of those people , and neither are the people I work with and neither are many of the students I teach . There's always something else that needs doing , and some of those things are of a high enough priority that they will push other activities out of the way .

So the time I need to practice has to be time that is difficult to displace . Emergencies happen , such as forgetting to turn the morning alarm back on at the end of the holidays , but under normal circumstances , practice time should be hard to move .

My regular practice time is now first thing in the morning , and although that means there is still everything else in the day left to do , I just get up half an hour earlier and start the rest of my day at the regular time .

This works well for me , as most of the things I do can't start until I arrive at work , which is around 8am each day , and so the practice can't get moved by that . I've also found that I'm much more attentive to what I'm doing first thing in the morning compared with later at night .

I try to get a second practice session in after work , but I've found that it is this session that normally gets pushed out of the way by after school activities , family activities , getting the shopping done and any number of other things that can't happen in the half hour I've had at the start of the day .

For me , the day now starts with practice , a swim and then off to work . It's working at the moment , and at least half an hour of practice gets done .

If you are having trouble getting a consistent time to practice , may I suggest getting up earlier and trying to fit it in then I also now go to bed half an hour earlier , which isn't a problem after a full day of teaching , if you don't have a silent piano and you live within fortissimo distance of others .

This may not be a popular choice , but if you can get away with it , give it a try .

This week's review is a piece by Tchaikovsky , but not the one you're probably thinking of . Back in the last century , I started subscribing to Audible before it was bought by Amazon , and over the years since I've subscribing to Audible before it was bought by Amazon and over the years since I've listened to a lot of audiobooks .

It's what I have on in the car when I've run out of podcasts . Back when I was travelling by train for four hours every day , I used to get through a lot of content . I still listen , and this week's suggestion is the book that I've just finished listening to Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky . See , it's not the one you were thinking of .

Also , tchaikovsky is spelt differently , though not in the book titles .

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British author who is well known in science fiction circles and who has won a number of very prestigious writing awards , notably the 2023 Hugo Award , which he has now refused because some riders were excluded from the competition so as not to offend the Chinese government where the awards were being held .

The service model is told from the point of view of UnCharles , a valet robot that finds itself a little outside of its normal environment . It becomes a vast tale about a possible future in which robots mostly replace human labour , and what happens to people as a result .

It is an immensely entertaining story with many complex ideas and a look at a possible future . The section that takes place at the farm seems just too real . The audiobook is on Audible and is read by the author , who is great to listen to and who delivers the story and characters perfectly At just under 12 and a half hours . It's well worth a listen .

Well , that's it for this week . If you'd like to contact me , email is the best way . You'll find me at david at pianofinelyshow and the website at wwwpianofinallyshow . In both cases , pianofinally is all one word . Let me know where you are in your piano journey . The show is also on Facebook and Instagram and is available as audio only on YouTube .

You can subscribe via any popular iOS or Android podcast application or from directories such as Apple Podcasts , spotify or Player FM . So until the next episode . I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time at the Keys . I'll

put two pieces into this week's progress . The first is the Canon by Fritz Spindler which I've been working on . It has come along quite nicely . It still needs a little bit of work on the dynamics as it moves between the two hands , but it's getting close to the right speed and I can play it fairly reliably .

The second piece is the piano part of Someone Like you by Adele , the piece I'm getting ready for performance . At the moment it's just the opening four bars but that's already half the chords in the whole piece . As you'll hear , the tempo is still a little uneven as I work to get both hands working together , but I think it's a good start .

The recording was made using the Kawaii NV-10 as the keyboard and Piano Tech 8 running on the Mac Mini . Piano Tech is set up with the Bosendorfer 280VC in player mode for the Canon and the U4 Upright in open mode for the Adele piece .