There was a similar thread on That Other Forum...it was started in 2010 and has almost 11k posts! I thought it would be nice to have something like that here, where you can share something as simple as "I finally nailed that tough measure," or a feat truly amazing like "I managed to record an entire piece without my cat jumping on the piano." 😺

I'm at work so my only achievement today will be "I survived my Friday and now I have 4 days of piano to look forward to."

Someone please kick this off with a more interesting achievement than that!

Today, I learned piano: P - I - A - N - O
And I managed to play the good'ol blues scale together with a new LH. Slowly and still with mistakes 🥴, but I managed to get through a few times.🤩 If I can play this with a metronome in a few days, I am happy 🥰

I finished two out of three pieces that I started early this month. Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" (grade 3 arrangement) and Piano Adventures lesson piece "Great Barrier Reef".

    lilypad I've been getting more interested in jazz lately and Watermelon Man is one of the songs that I already have on my playlist. 👍Do you have a particular source for arrangements, or was this one in a grade 3 book?

        I first tried to learn Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 two years ago, but put it aside because it felt too difficult (this was one of those rare occasions when I told my teacher I wanted to put it aside even though she thought I could do it). I started it again a few weeks ago as one of my summer pieces while lessons are on hiatus, and, wow, magic happened! I can play it! Sometimes it feels as though progress is nonexistent, or glacially slow, and that can be discouraging. But I have learned something in the last two years, and I am thrilled. 😀

          Stub I frequently make the mistake of retrying too-difficult pieces from 6-9 months earlier and I'm usually disappointed. If I wait at least a year then I get to experience a little of that magic. 🙂

            JB_PT The arrangement came from Hal Leonard "My First Jazz Standards Song Book". I've researched difficulty levels for some of the pieces as ranging from grade 3 to grade 6.

            I've accumulated almost a dozen books of jazz arrangements at various difficulty ranges. There are some really nice arrangements in the upper intermediate or advanced player category in Hal Leonard's "Jazz Piano Solo" series and "The Best Jazz Standards Ever". I'm a lower intermediate player, but I've tackled a couple of piece from those books as stretch projects. They took me 3 months to learn.

              I've been working on a Haydn piece for a while. Coming along nicely. At the last page this week.

              Pallas a task tracker on my iPad

              OK I'm weird, I'll admit it...your description of this app has me drooling a little. Would you mind sharing the name?

                Pallas

                Thank you! I will check it out.

                  Last week my teacher gave me a new duet with some tricky spots. I spent 3 days doing some tedious 'clicking up'* with the metronome and then took a 3 day break. After that it was fairly smooth sailing but I still wasn't close to the marked tempo. We played it in my lesson yesterday and it went really well - good enough to 'pass,' so on to the next!

                  *I followed Molly Gebrian's advice in her "How to practice to increase speed" series. I've always used the metronome but not in precisely this way. It's safe to say I'm a full member of the Dr. Molly Cult. 🤩Everything she says is pure gold as far as I'm concerned.

                  Pallas And how about a bumper sticker? She needs to come up with a cool catch phrase for her practice army. 😄

                      Pallas Not a t-shirt, but you could get her book when it's released later this year.

                          Pallas She's been teaching beginner kids also and used some strategies with them. If I could go back in time to when I first began playing any instruments, I'm sure many of her pointers would have been helpful from the start.

                          Edit. Sorry, I probably misread your post. I also often find reading more efficient than videos, except when they are showing how to play etc.

                            candela I had no idea, thank you! Sometimes a physical item makes it easier for me to remember things vs. having links or notes (or saved videos) online. I am a cheapskate and hardly ever purchase new books at full price, but this one might be worth it.

                            By the way...I have some musician's earplugs (i.e. "noise cancellers") on order. I really appreciate you sharing your story in the other thread.

                              6 days later

                              Pallas In my experience it can take ridiculous amounts of time to overcome piano difficulties. Months! Years! The piano rewards patience and persistence!

                                Pallas congrats, that's a big achievement!!

                                  My achievement today was utilizing a chord within Reverie, into the jazz hit Autumn Leaves.

                                  I shared in some forums that I play completely by ear, and the only reason I even started learning some "classical piano" was to improve my technique (prior to that, I only played non-classical). In the last year, as I've gotten exposed to Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, etc., I've been picking their chord progressions and integrating it into more modern stuff as well.

                                  I have an innate ability to connect dots between songs (e.g., Canon in D paired with Vitamin C Graduation; Moonlight Sonata with Fantasie Impromptu, etc)., and most recently paired Liszt un Sospiro with the theme song from the show This is Us.

                                  So it's reverse of what I've seen, where some folks will do a "jazz version of Chopin" I'm using the Classical pieces as inspiration 🙂

                                  Stub I started it again a few weeks ago as one of my summer pieces while lessons are on hiatus, and, wow, magic happened! I can play it! Sometimes it feels as though progress is nonexistent, or glacially slow, and that can be discouraging. But I have learned something in the last two years, and I am thrilled. 😀

                                  That's so true! Magic happens when you're not constantly watching your progress. Wait a year and what was hard is suddently easy.

                                  I constantly surprise myself at how quickly and easily I learn pieces that felt like climbing Mt. Everest before. Like just last week I managed to learn the first section of Rach's Elégie and this week I'm coasting through the middle section and climax (although I probably won't get through it all this week). That's like 2 pages per week of pretty advanced music and besides a couple of more technical spots it doesn't even feel very difficult. Last time I tried it this piece felt way too hard for me to handle.

                                  Well, that's my achievement of the week. 🙂