Time to finally tackle playing a complete song! The song in question is “Juanita”, a Spanish song that is the second exercise in my piano learning book. It has a catchy tune, and I have gotten quite good at playing the two parts separately, as you can see:
So, I should just be able to put them together, right? Well, not so fast. At first, I couldn’t seem to get it at all. However, I then realized that I should stop trying to combine the left and right hand parts at full tempo right away. After countless runs through it, I still could only manage to butcher it in very uneven slow-motion:
It appears that I have a lot more practice ahead of me to master the skill of playing different things with my two hands at the same time. That’s OK, though, as being able to stumble through at slow motion makes the whole thing seem not impossible. Continuing with my piano practice may be one of the things I do during a month-long winter break in which my social and other leisure activity options could be severely limited by COVID lockdown.
Overall, from this project I learned that putting learning and blogging about it off and doing binge catch-up was probably less effective and definitely more stressful than diligently staying on or ahead of schedule from day one. I am going to chalk that up to returning to full-time school for the first time in years during a pandemic and having to adjust to online instruction. I am no in a position to enter next semester feeling focused, motivated and decidedly not overwhelmed!