Episode 37 - Variety

Introduction
Welcome to Episode 37 of Piano, Finally, the podcast about learning the piano as an adult. This week, David talks about adding variety to practice routines, an insightful piano teaching podcast, and some exciting upcoming piano events.

Podcast Recommendation – The TopMusic Piano Podcast
Hosted by Rachel Ehring, this podcast is packed with insights for piano teachers, but learners will also find value in its interviews with musicians and discussions on different teaching styles. Listen here: TopMusic Piano Podcast.

Essay – Variety in Practice
Keeping practice sessions engaging is essential for staying motivated. David discusses how incorporating different musical styles, limiting repetitive playthroughs, and introducing fresh pieces can prevent practice fatigue. Blackout Bluesby Andrew Craggs has been a fun addition, and the blues scale adds a new challenge.

Upcoming Piano Events
📍 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (Texas, USA) – May 21 to June 7, 2025. Attend screening auditions for free! More info.
📍 Piano+ Autumn Piano School (Armidale, NSW) – April 14, 2025. A concert featuring the school’s tutors. Get tickets.
📍 Out West Piano Fest (Bathurst, NSW) – October 24-26, 2025. Sign up for ticket updates: Event info.
📍 Blue Mountains Music Festival – March 14-16, 2025. A weekend of live music! Tickets.

YouTube Recommendation – Pur Pasteur
The video Which Chord Sequences Produce Which Emotions explores the emotional impact of different chord progressions. A must-watch for theory enthusiasts! Watch here.

Progress Update
This week’s practice includes:
🎵 Bagatelle in F – Daniel Gotlobb Türk
🎵 Afternoon Snooze – Andrew Craggs
🎵 Blackout Blues – Andrew Craggs (focus on specific sections)

David has also changed his recording approach—this time, sharing the first take, mistakes and all. Let him know if you prefer this unedited approach!

You can contact me:

• via email at david@pianofinally.show; this is probably the best option
• the show website, www.pianofinally.show
• Instagram and Threads @pianofinally
• and on YouTube
• all the podcast directories - list
• here's the RSS feed

Some of the links to books and other items mentioned in the podcast are affiliate links for Amazon or other providers. If you use one of these links, a commission may be paid to me at no additional cost to you. Thank you if you use a link.
All reviews of products, websites and services are unpaid, and no sponsorship has been received for any content on this podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome
• 0:15 Opening
• 3:13 YouTube - TopMusic
• 5:09 Essay - Variety
• 9:54 Getting out of the house
• 12:13 YouTube - Pur Pasteur
• 12:49 Closing
• 13:47 Progress

Transcript

Introduction

G’day, everyone. I’m David Reidy; welcome to Piano, finally, a podcast by an old bloke who is getting around to learning the piano, finally.

[Crab Canon]

Welcome

Welcome to show thirty-seven. Thank you very much for being here. If this is your first time hearing the podcast, I hope you enjoy the episode. If you’re a returning listener, then thanks for coming back. If you’re learning the piano or another musical instrument, let me know how you’re going with it. You can contact me at david@pianofinally.show.

I’d like to give an especially warm welcome to everyone who has discovered the podcast over the past week. For the last month or so, the number of downloads for each episode has been fairly stable, but in the last week, the number has tripled. So, if you are one of the people who have just discovered the show, thank you so much for giving it a try.

Practising has been continuing on the new Blackout Blues piece for the repertoire, as I’ll speak about later. It has been a lot of fun, and it’s coming along nicely. The other pieces I have been working on are progressing, and the Fritz Spindler Canon I have been working on, which I last included in the progress section a few weeks ago, has finally moved on to the “I can play it correctly every time” level, three more pieces to go and I’ll happily move up a level.

I’ve adjusted my practice, following something Devi suggested in my last lesson. Generally, I practice some scales at the start of each session, mostly because learning the piano involves practising scales, apparently. It’s a decent way to get a practice session started; I’m playing both legato and staccato, though the staccato is still proving to be more difficult than I expected it would be; perhaps that comes from only playing them legato for so long.

The scales I’ve been practising are usually just those I think of, C major if I’m trying out anything other than legato; who wants to remember black keys when doing a thumb tuck and playing staccato? Then maybe a G major, D major and something else. It has been pretty random. Devi suggested that I should practice the scales of the keys of each of the pieces I’m practising. So this week it has been C major for the canon, F major for the Bagatelle and Afternoon Snooze and a blues scale for Blackout Blues. 

The Blues scale has proved interesting; it has only seven notes: C, E♭, F, F♯, G, B♭and C. When I play it, whether it is for one octave or for two, it sounds incomplete; I’m too used to eight-note octaves. I’ve got a workaround I’ve been using this week. I haven’t run it past Devi yet, and that’s to play the final note a second time when starting the descending part of the scale. At least when I get to the end of the run, I don’t feel like I’ve left something out along the way. I’ll have to see if my piano teacher approves.

[Crab Canon]

Podcast - The Top Music Piano Podcast

TopMusic is an Australian organisation run by Tim Topham out of Melbourne. It is primarily designed for teachers of instrumental music and voice rather than for students, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cover a lot of interesting material for us learners.

The main focus of the site is to provide resources and assistance for music teachers and it has membership plans for them, but there is also a collection of other resources that are freely available to everyone. Topmusic lists four different podcasts on their site, although it appears that the guitar podcast is no longer active. It has 78 episodes but the last was in 2023.

I’ve been listening to the piano podcast https://topmusic.co/piano-podcast/ which is hosted by Rachel Ehring. The episodes cover lots of different topics, from teaching techniques to the business side of running a piano studio to dealing with different types of students. It’s great to get some insight into the business side of piano teaching, especially as we learners are the customers of these businesses.

Perhaps the best part of these episodes, though, is when Rachel is interviewing the business owner, author, composer or whoever and we get a look into their musical life. The variety of ways that people have come to make a living teaching music is enormous, and it is truly interesting to hear the stories.

The final two Topmusic podcasts are The Top Cast and their new AI podcast. The Top Cast is very much aimed at the business side of music teaching, I listen to the interview episodes of that podcast but tend to skip the more business-oriented ones. The AI podcast uses an AI-generated and voiced script, and I can’t listen to it. It lacks the human connection that is such an important part of music. Have a listen, though; your opinion might be different.

[Crab Canon]

Essay – Variety

I mentioned last week that I was adding a new piece to my practice repertoire, and it has turned out to be a great success. Here’s why.

As an adult learner, I think one of the biggest hurdles is that, generally, we are pretty good at most of the activities we do. In our daily lives, we do many complex things reasonably competently. On a daily basis, I drive around a hundred kilometres; I don’t get lost, run into anything, I don’t run out of charge (I never run out of petrol, it’s an electric car). I successfully make meals and teach some science, and after this long, I’m comfortable doing all that. I am sure that you’re in a similar situation.

When it comes to something completely new though, competency is not the case. I didn’t expect to be good at the piano from the start. I know that it takes many years to get to a high standard, and I was prepared for that. I have always enjoyed an intellectual challenge, and I suspect that any adult who starts learning an instrument from scratch is also looking to challenge themselves, at least a little.

When I first started just over a year ago, everything was exciting; everything was new. Even being able to get the fingering right for a C major scale was an achievement, getting both hands to do it together was even more of a win. Even simple tunes were a great boost to my confidence. Progress was relatively quick, and because it was all new, it was all fun. It was easy to see progress over a short period of time, and that made it easy to practise enthusiastically.

Once I got the very basic techniques under some sort of control, I was able to move on to the pieces that were graded for the examinations. These clearly have a higher degree of difficulty than the very easy first pieces, and so it took me longer to get a real feel for the piece and how it should sound. These pieces also take longer to come together and then even longer to get to performance quality. And this is where I found a potential problem.

Before I go any further, I’m not discounting the need for thorough, regular practice when learning an instrument, but knowing intellectually what is effective and required doesn’t change the fact that sometimes the feelings in the moment don’t match that understanding.

And so, playing the same short, relatively simple at this level, piece of music over and over again becomes a bit boring. Practising the same two bars, slowly and with care, will certainly improve my playing over time, but that doesn’t make it more exciting. When I sit down at the next practice session and I see the progress that the previous day’s work has made, I feel a sense of accomplishment, but that doesn’t help ten minutes later when I’m working through the next two bars slowly again.

It’s a bit like waiting in line and climbing the stairs at a water park. You know that these preliminary steps are necessary for the excitement of the ride, and you’re willing to do it for the final outcome, but that doesn’t make it more exciting.

One of the things my piano teacher Devi has me doing is to only play each completed piece once or twice in any practice session. These are the pieces I am refining rather than learning, so I really have to concentrate when playing them as I only get one chance to make a mistake. This stops me from going over the bits I find easy too many times, but it is also helping to keep them fresh, with only a couple of plays each time, they don’t get boring. The feeling of accomplishment at getting them correct is enough to keep my enthusiasm for them fresh.

Starting a new piece is always exciting, and so I think it’s important to throw something new into the mix every so often. I’m currently working on four pieces at the moment, and I think that that is about the most I could reasonably manage in my half-hour practice sessions when I add in some scales, an exercise, and some just messing around time. What I noticed over the past two weeks though, is that when I added the fourth piece, Blackout Blues Andrew Craggs, the interest in practising it has lasted longer than for the pieces before. I think that that is because it is a Blues type piece, and I hadn’t played that sort of music before.

Maybe that’s the key to keeping practice interest up - find different musical styles on a regular basis so you’re hearing different things while still improving your skills. I’m going to talk with Devi and see if I can do that moving forward. Luckily, there are hundreds of different musical styles, so I’m looking forward to lots of exciting new discoveries as my playing slowly improves.

[Crab Canon]

Getting out of the house

Something new this week. I really think that getting out to see and hear some piano performances is a great way to stay motivated. Watching the Gina Bachauer and Chopin competitions on YouTube was great, but being there in person is so much better. From time to time, I’m going to call out some upcoming piano events that you might like to go to.

2025 sees the seventeenth edition of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition; the main rounds will run from 21 May to 7 June at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Tickets to the finals are almost sold out already, which might be a good thing as the only tickets left cost almost $3000 for the 27 concert series. You can, however, attend the screening auditions in Fort Worth from 16 to 22 March for free. Details are on the Van Cliburn website at cliburn.org https://cliburn.org/2025-competition/. If you can’t get there, it looks like the competition will be streamed on YouTube.

The Piano+ Autumn Piano School is back on in Armidale NSW this year. They have a showcase concert on Monday, 14 April, which is conveniently in the school holidays, so I’m going to drive up for the performance. The concert has performances from all the tutors at the school, and the program is wide and varied, it should be a fun night. Tickets are available on their website. https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing/1352021.

Later in the year, the Out West Piano Fest will take place in Bathurst over three days from the 24 to 26 October. The program is available on the website but tickets are not yet available, you can sign up to be notified. I intend to go this year, Bathurst is only a couple of hours from where I live, so even though it starts on a Friday, I will still be able to get there after work. Maybe I’ll see some of you there.

https://www.bathurstregion.com.au/event/out-west-piano-fest/2025-10-25/

Finally, the Blue Mountains Music Festival takes place from 14 to 16 March, tickets are available online, the details are in the show notes: https://www.bmff.org.au/tickets.

As the festival takes place five minutes away from my house, I’ll be going to that too, although I don’t think there are many pianists on the extensive list of artists.

[Crab Canon]

YouTube - Pur Pasteur

Here’s a very quick YouTube suggestion for this week. I’m going to have to go back and rewatch this one while sitting at the keyboard to try out the chord progressions he is talking about. It’s Which Chord Sequences Produce Which Emotions by Pur Pasteur. He uses a lot of musical examples to illustrate his ideas, so it’s a really comprehensive theory. I think it’s worth a closer look. I will do a proper review of the channel in the coming weeks. If you get a chance to watch the video, let me know what you think.

https://youtu.be/n6MViTAfNio?si=yCJ_N2Lz1A7kqJRb

Closing

Well, that’s it for this week.

If you’d like to contact me, email is the best way. You’ll find me at david@pianofinally.show and the website at www.pianofinally.show. In both cases, pianofinally is all one word. The show is also on Facebook and Instagram and available as audio-only on YouTube. You can subscribe via any popular iOS or Android podcast application or from directories such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. I also post an excerpt and link for each episode as an Instagram reel.

If you’re learning an instrument, let me know where you are in your journey. What’s going well, and what are the challenges?

And so, until the next episode, I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time at the keys.

[Crab Canon]

Progress

The three pieces in this week’s progress section are the usual, Daniel Gotlobb Türk’s Bagatelle in F, and Andrew Craggs Afternoon Snooze and Blackout Blues. I’ve only put the part of Blackout Blues I’ve been concentrating on in this week’s section. I’ve also made a change to the recordings I’m including. Normally I record each piece three times and include the best of the three, this week I’m just including the first take, mistakes and all. Let me know if you prefer it warts and all.

All the recordings were made using the Kawai NV10 as the keyboard and Pianoteq 8 running on the M4 Pro Mac Mini. Pianoteq is set to a New York Steinway D piano in player mode.

[Practice pieces]