Brain Stamina

Interesting site on the theory of Piano Technique and Practice:
(is printable in .pdf format)

http://members.aol.com/chang8828/contents.htm

On relaxation of the hands during practice:
"Note that relaxation applies only to the physical playing mechanism; the brain must never be shut off -- it must always be intensely focused on the music, even (or especially) when practicing. It is brain stamina that you must develop, not finger strength. Thus mindless repetitions of exercises such as the Hanon series is the worst thing you can do to develop stamina in your musical brain. If you don't develop brain stamina during practice, the brain will tire out part way through any performance and you will end up playing like a robotic zombie with no active control over the performance."

"Of course, in terms of stamina, it is not difficult (if you have the time) to put in 6 or 8 hours of practice a day by including a lot of mindless finger exercises. This is a process of self-delusion in which the student thinks that just putting in the time will get you there -- it will not. If anything, conditioning the brain is more important than conditioning the muscles because it is the brain that needs the conditioning for music. In addition, strenuous conditioning of the muscles will cause the body to convert fast muscles to slow muscles that have more endurance -- this is exactly what you do not want."

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Will be doing more interval based ear training drills, mainly transcribing and transposing phrases, song heads/melodies-Will start off by doing three phrases a day, see where that takes my ear a month from now, need to be more precise about feeling the distance between notes.

• think of melody lines in chunks, instead of just individual notes with intervalic relationships between each other: need to start seeing the bigger shape of the line
• ie: the line begins here and then changes directions after going all the way up to the fifth and then changes again after going down to the third.
  
• recognize common patterns that seem to reoccur in a lot of melodies
  
• ie: triad arpeggios going down or up (minor and major)
• ie: 7th chord arpeggios going down or up