Diya
Recommended minutes to practice: 15 minutes a day
What to practice: 5-note vocal warmup (plus piano), Happy, Young Hunter
How to practice it most effectively: For this new vocal warmup, start in C position and play 1-2-3-4-5; move up through D, E, etc. until you reach A position. You’ll notice that for D, E, F, and A positions you’ll need to add either some sharps or a flat – use your ear to guide you until you reach the major sound! You can do this warmup on a “da-da-da” vowel. For Happy, in the breakdown section please only sing the lyrics that are not in brackets – the brackets are for the background vocals. In the chorus, the third line goes quickly very high for the start of “clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth”. Make sure you’re taking big belly breaths between each chorus line since we’d prefer to not breath in the middle of the phrase. For Young Hunter, try playing each hand separately once before putting them together – watch out for your steps and skips, and use your sayings and finger numbers in position to help you.
Dvorah
Recommended minutes to practice: 10 minutes a day
What to practice: C major scale, All My Friends, Bells of Great Britain
How to practice it most effectively: For the C major scale, please play one hand at a time going up: LH’s fingering is 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 and RH’s fingering is 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5. See if you can make the scale as connected and smooth as possible by hanging onto one note until the next one presses down. You can still play All My Friends as a review piece – just remember to hold through the tied quarter notes for that beat instead of playing them again. Bells of Great Britain will be our main song this week. This piece uses your pedal! Hold it down for the whole piece so it sounds like bells. The first line has a repeat sign – the first time through the line you play f, which means loud, and the second time will be p, which means soft. In the second line your RH C and E moves up one octave, then two octaves!
Oliver
Recommended minutes to practice: 15 minutes a day
What to practice: Little River, Sailing in the Sun, Haunted Mouse
How to practice it most effectively: Little River you can use as a warmup song – work on getting the notes as legato as possible under the slurs. For Sailing in the Sun, you’re in the position where the thumbs are right side by side on B and C. There are many times where the slurs for connecting pass from one hand to the next. For the rests, please make sure there is silence in both hands for that one beat. For Haunted Mouse, the last detail to add in is the dynamics! Remember that f means loud and p means soft; in line three, try growing louder as you play the pattern.
Ken
Recommended minutes to practice: 15-20 minutes a day
What to practice: G major scale hands together, Court Dance (Rock version), and Looking Glass River
How to practice it most effectively: For the G major scale, finger 3s line up on B and E – these fingerings are the exact same as C major; the one difference is there’s an F#. Court Dance (Rock Version) can be a review song this week – do your best to make bars 3, 7, and 15 move in time with the rest of the song. In bars 9 to 12, note that the rhythm is all quarter notes, even with the held tie; as you noted, it’s not like the quick Jazz Blast rhythm. For the new song Looking Glass River, LH is doing the bottom-top-middle-top pattern for most of the song; watch for when it changes from a C major triad to the D-F-G shape. Since it’s your first week playing this one, don’t worry about dynamics yet. RH has a few major scales in this piece, but they’re always started on the 7 (so B in C major) – please do the 2-1 fingering there. If you’d like you can try transposing the first 8 bars to G major (try thinking in numbers to help you transpose!).
Linda
Recommended minutes to practice: 20 minutes a day
What to practice: Cool Groove, Pyrenese Melody, preliminary look at I’ll Be Seeing You
How to practice it most effectively: For Cool Groove, the last detail to add to really make it “groove” is the swing feel – see if you can count “1+2+3+4+” with the long-short, skipping counting to help you align the notes that come in on the “off” beats. There is really only one syncopated rhythm that comes back again and again: 1 and (two) and. Please continue to look at Pyrenese Melody, and see if you can play through some of the chords in I’ll Be Seeing You, making note of any questions you have for next week.