I can’t say how long I’ve been practicing Marian McPartland’s Twilight World. Months and months! The transcription is 8 pages long. For some time now, I’ve had pages 6,7, and 8 memorized. But I’ve been stuck on page 5 for quite some time. I suspect that practice technique (or lack thereof) are to blame, but I have been stuck! Finally yesterday morning was breakthrough. The bottom 3/4 of Page 5 works without referring to the transcription.
I have a lot to learn about memorization, and I still find it somewhat frightening … because honestly, once it is done, the playing of the song is some kind of miracle.
I wish I could get into another musicians head, and see how he or she thinks!
Despite it all, my memorized repertoire is growing. I need to tackle the top bit of page five with rigor, and see if I can speed the process along. Twilight world is such a beautiful tune, I’m not bored with it, but it would be nice to grow the repertoire faster!
Good grief.
I accidentally deleted the previous post, thinking I was deleting a comment. Where is my backup? Well … I didn’t contact my webhost.
I copied and pasted from the cached version that Google had, then updated the post date using mysql.
Here’s the google search I used to find the item:
site:blog.duanemcguire.com sketchup
Google seems to know just about everything.
I had the good fortune of attending a one day class on Google Sketchup on Thursday of last week. Good fortune, yes, because without some guided instruction, Sketchup was rather intimidating. In six hours, I learned far more than I could have on my own.
In the new house, I’m certain that pianos will move in and out from time to time. As such, I wanted a ramp from the garage floor to the kitchen. (This is the best route into the home for a piano) Commercially available aluminum and fiberglass ramps are prohibitively expensive, so I decided to build a wooden ramp specifically for this purpose.
Piano Man Meets Sketchup
Wow. Designing in 3D is pretty. Pretty intense too. To be fair, I’d already designed the geometry of the ramp using a CAD tool
The Old-Fashioned Way
But the sketchup tool makes a pretty picture, and with 3D, I actually got into the details. I was able to specify the specific joints for the plywood, and realized that a tapered hardwood shoe at the base of the point was needed. That was a detail that was going to wait for construction otherwise.
It was interesting to see that the modeling tool, in fact, improved the product.
If you install Google Sketchup, you may explore the model itself with this download.
