And we're on Step 5

A month to the day after I started PlayPianoFluently Step 4, I started Step 5.

I think what was holding me in Step 4 for a while was worrying about keeping my fingers' "sense of space" or "proprioception" permanent. That is, as soon as I walked away from the piano and then walked back, my fingers' "sense of space" in the keyboard should have persisted. Also, I think it was wrong to expect to never have to look at the keyboard at all...EVER... and keep the sense of where my fingers were after just walking up to any keyboard. Pretty absurd!

I realized a few days ago that I could keep the sense of where my fingers were, once I orientated myself in front of the keyboard and got an initial key played (like playing "middle C" or something). Then, while I was sitting at the piano, the proprioceptive sense in my fingers would stick (as long as I focused on it).

Letting go of the idea that I had to keep that sense "permanent" (even after walking away) allowed me to finally move beyond Step 4 to the next step.

I'm really enjoying the current step. It has memorization in it (remembering tonal blocks). I have all the tonal blocks from this step memorized already; just need to make them permanent. Also, I haven't started the improvisation portion of step 5... where you improvise over the tonal blocks. 

I'll probably be on step 5 for at least a few weeks. Currently, I don't forsee any roadblocks to mastering the step.

Piano Fluency - Into Step 4!

 My Play Piano Fluently training seems to be going pretty well. I've recently started working on Step 4--Improvising on 3 and 4 Key Blocks.

For a few weeks, I seem to have been stuck on Step 3... but it was because I had not been connecting my conscious awareness of the blue and red groups in the "keyboard map" to the physical keyboard in front of me.

This graphic is finally how I started to see things... while looking straight ahead, I would try to "sense" each of those blue and red group "shapes" and then notice where the fingers I had played in those groups were located. This is how to connect tonality and location.--all much better explained in the materials. 

If I can just keep those shapes "sensed" where the graphic shows them, I'll be able to "map" the groups into my body--as the method explains.

So far, I'm about 7 weeks into the method. Phil Best (the creator of the method) mentions that to get through all 15 steps, it takes (on average) 3 years. If I continue at the same rate, I'll be through the course in 21 more weeks. Of course, that's probably not possible because of two things 1) some steps will be much more involved than the early steps... there's a lot of meat on the bones 2) there will be unforseen breakages and stoppages in my schedule where I will not be able to practice--for perhaps days at a time. 

I hope not. Hope I'm able to finish this method (eventually) and become a fully fluent pianist!