Beginners blues/boogie/rock discussion

Nightowl I think perhaps this video has been edited a couple of times - around 5.26 and 7.44?

No, I didn't do any video editing except moving the camera. What you heard is me adapting to the metronome. If you look carefully, you can see the bottom of a smartphone on the music rest (lightblue hull). It runs a metronome app with loud tic-toc-toc-toc. I can hear it through my headphones; but it is not recorded for the video. The metronome was running to prevent me speeding up. But I did a few times, and then had to slow down. This are exactly the moments you pointed out. Same happened at the very beginning. My tempo was very unsteady, the first bars. Good ear

Nightowl but I would say that I was not keen on the ending; partly because it didn't quite seem to fit with what had gone before

So you didn't like my ending? eh?
Joking aside - I don't like it either. The recording at that place is awful. But I wanted to finish the lesson and I didn't want to play again a 8 minute humptee dumptee left hand (Sophia is so right about that, sigh). Honestly, you are absolutely right, the ending was crap. I played it at the beginning of a 12-bar pattern, but it needs to be placed at bar 10 of 12 to sound good. This speaks for you, Nightowl. You are developing an ear for blues and how it should sound.

If you find anything you don't like, please tell me. Don't be afraid to criticize me just because I started 3 years earlier. If you think, something sounds wrong, then something is wrong. Or like a friend of me said: "You don't need to be a chicken to know when an egg is bad".

@Nightowl & @Sophia Thank you for your kind words and triple thank you for being honest!

Sophia Even though I suspect you still need to spend a little time getting each new lick into your fingers, right?

absolutely

WieWaldi No, I didn't do any video editing except moving the camera.

So, do you mean you stopped playing and recording, then moved the camera, then started playing/recording again? I noticed the camera angles changed but thought maybe you had two cameras set up. I heard slight variations in tempo, but it was the different camera positions that really caught my attention.

Sophia This piece seems a bit disjointed - the first minute is a bit dull and seems to go nowhere, but around the 1.10 mark there is a nice note run before it morphs into a new piece completely. That said, it's a blues lesson rather than a named piece, so that's probably why it doesn't follow the usual format of the short classical/folk melody pieces I'm used to playing from the method books. Anyway, it's another lesson under your belt.

Sophia This one was played really well. The transition from straight to swing sounded a bit bulky, even with the use of the turnaround. But I remember very well, the lesson is what it is. Christian didn't tell exactly how to softly move over, he simply had another line, he played it in swing. Period. But you showed in a very impressive way, you truely mastered this lesson and you are free to move onto lesson 3. I will be a very smooth and calm one, with a wonderful ending.
My takeaway of your recording - my positive takeaways is that someone can easily also learn some classical music from the classical era, despite spending a lot of time in blues lessons. This gives me confidence in one bright and shiny day I'll be able to do so, too. My other takeaway - my frustrating takeaway is that I am only 7 months ahead of you. I mean 7 WieWaldi-months, this translates into about 2 Sophia-months, two short Sophia months while Sophia is still learning Beethoven and Chopin along the way.
tl;dr: congratulations for mastering the Peter Gunn Theme lesson. It was - as always - a joy to listen to your recording and see your cute tomcat on the screen.

WieWaldi My other takeaway - my frustrating takeaway is that I am only 7 months ahead of you. I mean 7 WieWaldi-months, this translates into about 2 Sophia-months, two short Sophia months while Sophia is still learning Beethoven and Chopin along the way.

It's true! Sophia lives in a different time dimension to the rest of us bloody beginners! She began Alfred's book 1 a couple of months after me, then zoomed through book 2 and has nearly finished book 3! All this while tackling the blues course! It's enough to give normal folk an inferiority complex! Don't worry WieWie, I share your pain and will not let Sophia forget that her MUSICAL GENES (which I rarely mention) are doing the heavy lifting for her!

Sophia You made my day

Nightowl Sophia lives in a different time dimension to the rest of us bloody beginners!

Us bloody beginners? Us? Hey!!! How do you dare and promote me down. I am a total beginner^TM. And I am moving forward, not backward. This means, I will go on and become a mediocre beginner one day. And I won't stop there. No, I have set my goals very high. I want to become something better, like an exceptional mediocre beginner.

Sophia I will definitely continue on a classical path as well, ok, I don't want to become a concert pianist, but my end goal is to become an intermediate* player and stay there forever. There, I finally said it out loud

I am on that boat too. After beginner stuff, I'd like to think there is much more to keep it exciting. I am not very interested on advanced pieces and I will never get there anyway. But I do want to gather enough skills so I can noodle on the keys, play fun stuff in classical/blues/jazz/pop etc. I wouldn't mind if they have to be "intermediate" arrangements.

Sophia That's brilliant, but also quite disturbing!

WieWaldi My sincere apologies WieWie, it was never my intention to demote you. You are the BBK (Bavarian Blues King) and there is nothing mediocre in the way you play.

hebele Same here, I think intermediate level is a nice place for hobbyists to be. I don't want to spoil my hobby by trying to attain skills that are probably out of reach anyway.