brain training

I have been practicing one page, mostly three bars on one page, since lunch time.

Well over an hour.

I don't remember doing this when I was younger. Am I more patient now, or more determined? Or am I forgetting how hard I used to work back in the day? Is it because I still am forcing flakes of rust off some of my fiddlin' muscles, because they just haven't been this challenged in years and years and years? No matter.

I thought I had happened upon a good strategy there for a while, to help me increase the tempo on a 24 note run. The piece is being conducted in one, and I'm not sure how fast it was at the last rehearsal, only that it was a lot faster than I was able to play it, and the conductor says he plans to do it even faster at the March 7 concert. I had been practicing it way too slowly. It's a bunch of triplets, so I started playing just the first note of each triplet (one of three) in tempo, and adding more and more of the other notes, here and there, as embellishments when I felt comfortable. After a while, it started to sound pretty good. Then, somehow, it fell apart, and I am now back to playing it one note at at time, increasing one click at a time on the virtual (Iphone) metronome. But I stopped to blog about it because it didn't seem right that it should start getting harder.

Don't worry folks, I will not give up. I can drum my fingers really, really, really fast on the counter (I jsut checked), so I know they CAN move more quickly. I just have to train them. Come on, neurons!!!