Ashes of Dreams - Snapshot #5
So I've actually been able to play through the whole piece for like.. a solid week now lol but haven't had the chance to really record anything....... today wasn't the best piano day so excuse the rough excerpt but THIS WAS THE BEST I COULD DO
My fave part is the ascending octave bass line in the LH at 0:12 but you can't really hear how awesome it is because I literally froze before the F octave :-) but the following phrase was also the toughest bit in this excerpt- the RH goes from a regular A flat chord immediately to stacked(?) fourths with base on A flat??? And includes D natural and G natural?? Is that even a stacked fourth? Let it be known that I know literally no music theory lol.... and the LH goes octave F to F and then immediately launches into continuous eighth notes that require my LH to reposition completely and it's.... not a great time.... but I learned it so yay
I very consciously bring out the upper RH melodic line at 0:20; the style is a little reminiscent of the arrangement style from the FFXV book where there were three "lines" going on at once, LH for bass and RH for middle supporting tone (alto???) and RH also housing the melody. But this phrase is significantly easier than what I had to learn in the FFXV book haha.
The run at 0:44 was actually not super easy to get down?? There are some skipped notes so it's not a complete scale (to my surprise) and then the fingering is just weird but now it's pretty comfortable. But then it launches into stacked fourths right after only two "launchpad" single eighth notes and it's NOT FRIENDLY for my hand size HUFFS but.. managed somehow.... honestly all the chords from that point are actually deceivingly difficult to hit but I actually made it look not too hard so NICE
I also keep messing up the fingering at 0:33 =______= literally while recording today I started to overwrite my fingering with this new bad one where I end on 5?!??!?!?! IT'S SO BAD!!! I need to go back and relearn that bit properly.
Anyway y'all see what I meant when I said this part had the cutest iteration of the melody right?? The very beginning.... the higher register with the open space makes for such a lovely break on the ears (the part before this is pretty bombastic relative to the rest of this piece) and also brings more attention to the fact that the melody is reappearing imo. After this, the piece really just is relentless with swung eighth notes in the RH and blocked chords in the LH until the very end phrase which I purposely left out so there's some new content for the final clean recording ^_^v it's just.. quarter notes and half notes lol with big open chords at the very, very end. It's nice!! There are also like eight bars I think that I actually did not upload (after the gliss) that I've worked on; it's pretty grandiose and bright, so it was fun to work on them.
I guess I had more to say than I expected about this part lol. I wasn't really happy with my entire practice session today but looking at the recording now, I guess it's not too bad. A little stilted but nothing extraordinarily terrible.... hopefully.
I've been going back and cleaning up some phrases from other parts of the piece but sometimes I feel like.. I never learned them properly in the first place?? Which is so weird because I did spend time consciously breaking these exact phrases down (LIKE THE ONE WITH THE JUMPING INTERVALS) so I've had a bit of heartburn relearning some bits but I'm hopeful that this is all progress towards one cohesive piece. I also realized that when I'm recording myself, I should probably adopt a more performance-centric mindset instead of simply treating recordings as videos of my practice sessions.. something else to work on.
All in all, I think I started out really strong when learning this piece but gradually started slipping back into poorer practice habits lmao... oops. But trying to make up for it by being more meticulous about later phrases.
Hopefully will be able to get a clean decent recording up of the full piece soon. And then will move onto the next piece!!