New member introduction

[lebiffo]

Hello All,

This is to introduce myself as a new member of this very interesting and helpful forum.  I started to learn to play the piano six months ago and at 67 years of age have perhaps left it rather late.  But nevertheless I feel I am making progress, albeit somewhat slowly, my piano teacher makes encouraging noises form time to time but perhaps she is just being encouraging, she’s a good teacher.

I put in about an hour to an hour and a half a day for practice.  My sight reading seems to be developing ok, and my articulation is about you would expect at my level.  However I have been surprised at how much time it takes me to learn to play even simple pieces and then how quickly I forget them when moving on to the next ones I am given to learn.  This is undoubtedly a factor of my age, but I find the challenges of new pieces are such that that I do not have the time to keep on rehearsing pieces that I have learned so that when I return to them it can take an hour or two, a days practice, even to get back to a basic level again.  Often, when I start a new practise session I find that my brain has regressed and that I have to put in a lot of work to get back to the stage I left off the previous day.  The result is that I spend practically all of my time on new pieces and am neglecting to build up a repertoire.  I probably need to manage my practice time better, I know.

The two pieces I’m working currently are Bach’s (Petzold’s) Minuet in G Major BWV 114 (d/loaded from this site) and the jazz standard ‘Fly me to the Moon’.  I suspect these are a bit ambitious for me at the moment I certainly have difficulty in achieving any sort of reasonable speed and that’s understating it!   However I am enjoying myself even though I get a bit frustrated at times.   Any comments on the above would be appreciated.

[ladypianist]

Welcome to the forum. It sounds like a fine beginning.  Slow and steady and you will progress. Enjoy your studies


Lady pianist.

[jimbo320]

Lebiffo,
Welcome to the forum and I applaud the fact that you are going for it. Being up there in age too I experience slowness in some learning. Oh well!
I just chimed in to say hi.....

Musically, Jimbo

[becky8898]

Hi Lebiffo: welcome to the Forum. Hope you get a blast out of your music studies.  Just enjoy the journey and let it take you where it takes you.  Oh, thanks for the reply to my post. Appreciate it.

Cheers, Becky

[lebiffo]

Thanks for the replies.  Actually I'm feeling a lot more encouraged today after having a very positive practice session yesterday evening.  I played a number of pieces that I had learned some months ago and found that my technique has improved quite markedly.  The alternating finger work involved in playing Bach is very helpful in this respect.  So I'm obviously not quite as decrepit as I thought .