the night's like coffee to my tongue...

My music came today! It's very exciting. :) I haven't had new sheet music to work on in a long time. Of course, since I wrote in my last post that I haven't worked on my old music enough to master it, that shouldn't really mean much... but it's exciting to have new stuff, especially since some of the songs are ones I've wanted to learn for a few years now.

I've been practicing my new music pretty much since it arrived, with breaks to cook dinner and then to eat dinner, and now my back kind of aches from my poor piano playing posture, so I'm taking another break to write this. :) As I suspected, they're difficult pieces. If any of you play the piano, you were probably taught to practice new pieces one hand at a time until you're comfortable enough with each separate part to put them together. That method is impossible with this music - at least, it is for me. These songs have tricky timing that I can't count out without playing both parts together. I actually think it would take a lot longer to learn them separately and then have to figure out how they fit together. They don't really make sense without each other.

Speaking of tricky timing, the time signatures on some of these songs are crazy. I think the winner was the song I put on the music player on this page, called Eric's Song, which I'm leaving up for now since I'm talking about it again. Do you know what the time signature on that thing is? 9/8. I don't think I've ever seen that before. I'm still trying to figure out the easiest way to count it out while I play. It's tempting to just time it by ear, but then I get lost in the more difficult passages. Until I can adjust my mind so that the cadence feels natural when I play, I'm stuck counting.

Some songs already seem promising. I wish I could find Momentum on playlist.com so I could put it up here. It's my favorite song on the album, and it's coming along well enough that I can actually sing parts of it- really, really slowly. The time signature is another one you don't see too often (4/2) but not as confusing to count.

Ok. Break's over. :)