Apart from the lice, two other things have been interfering with my blogging: (1) my stupid computer, and (2) my backlog of audio and video. The computer is now mostly working, and I’m slogging through the backlog.
Things have been going remarkably well lately. We started working on Carcassi’s Andante two weeks ago, beginning with the first phrase (about 2 bars). Today, we started working on the next phrase. My main focus has been M’s right-hand technique. I’ve done three things that, together, have really succeeded in getting M to focus on her right hand.
- First, I’ve been using video during our lessons. My phone takes worse video than my point-and-shoot, but the playback screen on the phone is so much bigger that it works well to take phone video during our home practices. (The phone audio is atrocious, but I can edit the video and substitute the audio from my handheld recorder. Of course, this introduces further delay in doing anything blog-related with the videos and audio.)
- Second, I’ve been placing a mirror in front of M so she can watch herself.
- Third, I’ve been using a point system to judge each note she plays. As I’ve mentioned before, she loves getting scores. I have her play the first 10 notes of Andante, and give her a score of from 0 to 2 (or rarely, 3) for each melody note she plays. Some days, I give her a half a penny for each point she earns, which she gets excited about. But mostly, she just likes the instant feedback. What I’ve been surprised by is how much, and how quickly, she has internalized the standards — if she plays a 1 or a 0, she usually knows it. And she is so interested in getting a good score that she really concentrates on what she is doing.
I don’t have any recent audio or video ready to post, but I did finally get around to posting a few videos from November 11. I posted them on a backdated post for November 11 here (I’m trying to keep the blog in chronological order).