Stand Your Ground #4

Hello!! It’s been a while, had some personal stuff going on.. but things are resolved now and I was able to take a progress video of the whole piece. It’s not great, but at least it’ll help me gauge my progress.. I’d say I’m about 70% done with the piece, with my goal being 80%. There are some parts that are just physically so beyond me that I am lowering my own standards, but more on that later..

Detailed Analysis

I’m not really going to go into a ton of detail for the stuff I’ve already broken down by section before, but I will mention some notable moments throughout.

I am happy to say that phrase at 0:13 is a lot more comfortable now for the LH octaves; I don’t have to think nearly as hard about where to place my hand which is great. It’s still tough, for sure, but it’s no longer got me sweating less than 15 seconds into the piece.

I admit I haven’t actually practiced the section at 0:47 properly lol AND IT SHOWS!! I’ve run through the notes, but the connection isn’t very seamless going into this section.. the RH octave stretch is hard, as always, but aside from that, I’m just out of practice. Didn’t quite hit the mark at 0:59 with that octave, but my sixteenths sound way cleaner now at 1:01!!

Tons of little errors in this next section at 1:06, which is fine- they happen. Just need to practice more. Still struggling with voicing and avoiding accented thumbs in the RH.

I’m actually really happy with how 1:27 came out in this take. This is by far the cleanest I’ve been able to play the LH, on camera no less. I honestly can’t really believe I played this myself lol.

1:40 is super messy; I was going faster than I’m used to going, and I lost my baseline early on so I was floundering through most of those arpeggios in the LH, whoops. I’ve also found these arpeggios are too big to comfortably execute (compared to, say, arpeggios that extend to sevenths instead of octaves), so I’ve resigned myself to just having to Do My Best with these. Contemplating slowing down for this section so the sixteenths are cleaner, but at the same time, I don’t want to lose momentum for this phrase. I buffered at 1:51 because I got mixed up with the reprise of this that comes later..

I managed to improve 1:55 with the split octaves a bit. Some missed notes here, but I’ve played it 100% accurate off-camera, so just need to practice. Overall, I’m happy I can play them so much faster and relatively cleanly.

Okay, from 2:38 we hit some new territory. I played the RH for this in the last post, but I don’t think it was nearly as fast. I need to go back and clean this part up because the polyrhythm is really crass for the first half especially, but I at least know the notes and can physically execute each hand. If I think about the LH to drive the eighth notes, then it’s not as bad, but if my focus slips, then you can definitely hear the pulling between the rhythms. I also need to work on VOICING here in the RH- it’s harder and harder the faster I go, and honestly, things got a little frantic here in this take..

2:54 is dramatic chords, with the only real challenge in the RH octaves at 3:06 since they’re eighth notes and require my hand to move quite a bit in a short space. Luckily I’ve managed so far, but other than that, surprisingly grief-free (knock on wood).

Again with the arpeggios at 3:08; there are very slight differences from the phrase at 1:40, but the LH is basically copy paste. I think I’m going to add a sudden rit at 3:23 because I cannot, for the life of me, get my LH to jump down to that low D then fly back up to the D Bb D chord in an eighth note at this tempo. That is already by far one of the most challenging stretches for my LH, and at this tempo, after over 3 minutes of intense playing.. yeah, I don’t know lol. I can do it if I isolate this micro-phrase, but I haven’t gotten it in a bigger context yet. I’ll work at it.

More split octaves at 3:25 with lots of errors LOL I swear I’ve played this fine on my own but I struggled hard today. The octaves in the RH at 3:38 are, predictably, the single bar that I hold my breath for most in the entire piece. If I miss one octave’s precise location, then it throws me off, even if I still managed to hit the octave somewhat cleanly.. so that’s why I ended up trying a few times before succeeding.

The final octaves are ROUGH from 3:44; not only are they chords, but I’m also at nearly 4 minutes of almost nonstop high speed playing, AND I’M SUPPOSED TO GO FROM FF TO FFF like bro.. I.. I am not powerful enough.. I think I’m going to slow down slightly from the ascending RH octaves to set myself up for a little more success (hopefully). Taking the tempo down even a few notches gives me enough breathing room to focus more on the accents for the final chords and also prepare myself for the last chords at 3:49 (you can hear me miss the note accuracy for the very last chord). My RH is already pretty stressed by this point, and having to focus on going from all black keys (manageable) immediately to all white keys with a slight adjustment in the space of an eighth note is pretty rough. And the hardest chord of all is the very last one. For some reason, having to shift my hand to the right maybe one centimeter is actually tougher than the black to white shift. EVERYTHING IS HARD MAN.. but I did find the trick to emphasizing the final notes after the chords, so at least there’s that.

Current Thoughts

For some reason, I’m yet again getting tripped up by things I already spent time on which is.. mildly aggravating, but I guess I just gotta go back and put the work in again. I made mistakes here and there but just kept going since this is a pretty “honest” take (rather than trying to produce a perfect take).

You can really tell I just stitched this together section by section rather than practicing it holistically, so I need to work on transitions and also the overall flow of the piece. I’ve finally started practicing the piece as a whole, but as you can see, it’s not something I can repeatedly play over and over again in its entirety.. I definitely need to practice smarter, not harder here. Something I learned from “1000 Words” was that I tend to focus on sections rather than the entire piece, and that contributes a lot to errors while recording. Hopefully I can find a way to fine tune the piece overall while also not having to grind through it over and over again physically.

But, I have learned all the notes, and I can at least play through it somewhat. I think the biggest outstanding things to clean up are locking in the minute differences between similar phrases to avoid freezing; those LH arpeggios that need to be faked consistently somehow; and adding any slowdowns needed to compensate for physical limitations.

I’m starting to feel like the piece is not that hard- like, yes, of course it’s hard in the sense that my hands want to detach from my wrists sometimes but a lot of the physical barriers are because of hand size and not necessarily because of the objective difficulty, per se. I hope that makes sense. I know I mention hand size a lot and it might sound like an excuse, but hand size is seriously a permanent barrier that I simply cannot overcome sometimes, no matter how hard I try.. I’m trying to learn to live with it rather than just resent it. But I still resent it, if I’m honest lol.

I feel like I’ve spent a while on this piece now, and while I told myself at the beginning that I wouldn’t stress over it, I am getting a little restless. I want to close out this piece and move on.. there’s a new project I’m eyeing (a little different from my usual solo pieces) and then I also need to shop for my next piece. But, need to finish this one properly, first.