I have to change how I'm learning scales. They say, "neurons that fire together wire together," and in my lesson yesterday, my scales crashed and burned. I thought I was doing well! I could sit at my piano and play any of 7 random scales, three octaves, hands together, crescendo/diminuendo, voila! But in the lesson, I couldn't do it.
Cue recriminations! WHY WHY WHY!
If I go back to when I was learning C major and A minor harmonic, when I first started lessons, I was only focused on those two scales, and so I practiced them every which way but loose legato, staccato, backwards, forwards, hands separately, hands together, etc. I made up new patterns on the fly. And I marched into my lesson, and BOOM. I could just whip them out perfectly.
Then my teacher got excited, and started assigning me a new pair of scales every week. I learned them all legato, bass to treble, HT, cresc/dimin. But none of the variations. And I can't reproduce what I can do at home to save my life. So instead of feeling like a superstar, I have to back up and do G major and E minor harmonic the way I did C/A minor.
Five steps forward, four steps back!
To console me, my teacher told me horror stories of her graduation exams: starting from a random measure, recite several measures of a memorized piece, playing the bass and SINGING the treble. I went home to practice my two scales with great gratitude that she is not going to do that to me. Probably. 😂😂😢
