Jan 14 (Var 2)

Happy weekend! Practicing in the daytime is undoubtedly more effective than practicing at night. 




Here's a puzzle for you: listening to this recording, can you tell me which parts of the song are hardest to play? I'll give you a second...














While you're thinking about that, here's a little anecdote that may or may not be true but has that ring of 'truthiness' that people love. In World War 2, the Royal Air Force was sending planes on bombing missions into German territory. The Germans, of course, were trying to shoot those planes down. Now a plane can only be so heavy if it wants to fly, and they want to pack as many bombs on there as possible, so they want to use their armor plating (solid steel, basically) as efficiently as possible. The planes go out in good shape, and some of them come back. The ones that do come back often sport bullet holes where the German planes shot them. So the question is: where should they put that heavy armor plating to best protect the planes? And the naive answer is: put it where the bullet holes are, that's where the planes are getting shot!

But it's the wrong answer, because that's where the planes that *made it home* got shot. It's the ones that don't make it back who needed that extra armor. So you put more armor where the bullet holes *aren't*.

Like I said, it's probably not true; I'm sure the engineers had better ways to answer the question than that. But! It suggests the answer to my question above.











You have it? Of course, the hardest parts are the ones that sound the most natural! At least, that's true now, once I've just about got the song figured out. At the very beginning, the hardest parts sound the worst, of course, but they're also the first parts I practice. And I don't stop practicing them until I've got them. So by the time I'm playing the song a tempo, I've practiced all the really hard parts to death, and the mistakes I make are the parts that I haven't spent much time on. That's why I find it paradoxically easier to learn a piece that's difficult all the way through. Maybe through this project I'll learn how to practice even the easier parts. But, knowing me, maybe not...