The Baroque Project

I’m still sticking to my practice schedule:

• 20 minutes of a scale, though now I’m playing with a metronome, which is really helping a lot with my rhythm, even when I’m playing other stuff without the metronome (many thanks to my teacher for that advice!).  How To Practise has posted a great list of reasons to play scales, BTW.
• 20 minutes of my current study piece, which is currently the sarabande from Bach’s G Major suite — a serious stretch at the moment, but it feels like it’s getting somewhere. The rhythm is the tricky bit (see: sudden interest in using the metronome all the time).
• 20 minutes on a new piece that varies at least week-by-week, and now sometimes from day to day, to try to improve my sight-reading.  This really seems to have helped!  Yesterday I looked at the bass part for #6 from Purcell’s Sonatas in IV Parts for the first time.  It’s really simple, just five bars long, repeated, in B-flat major (though the facsimile edition confused me by using three flat symbols — one for each of the B-flats! — though actually it’s presumably G minor anyway), but would have taken a while for me to piece together even back in March.  This time, I played it through passably on the first pass and was entirely comfortable with rhythm, phrasing, and intonation after 15 minutes.  A small achievement, but it felt great!

Now if only I could find a way to play more than one hour a day…