Day 3

Still at it, I scored a little over an hour today. I did some Pumping Nylon exercises (slurs) earlier in the day along with some scales, and then later tonight, I did the Spider and Odair finger independence exercises for quite a while, along with some didactic pieces meant to work on specific left and right hand issues. My third and fourth left hand fingers are still a little clumsy compared to the other two, but they'll come around. I've just never worked to get them to be more fluid. I dug deeper into the initial 10 Giuliani arpeggio studies. The first two or three aren't that big of a deal, but I got hung up occasionally on some of the next 5. I'm marking down those that don't come super easily to me, and will build up a set of exercises that work on specific problem areas.

As for repertoire, I spent some time making sure of the 4 measures early in the "Hermanina" piece that were tricky, and then added the next two measures, which are also slightly tricky. After some careful work there, I moved to the end of the piece, and reviewed the last 5 measures. Once done with that, I added two more measures to the end section, which required quite a bit of work figuring out left hand fingerings very high up on the fretboard. I also figured out a misprint in the music, based on Cruz's own left hand fingering notations in the piece. I tried it both as written and as it seemed to be, and chose the one that fit best.

It was relatively easy to get the last 20 measures or so of the Carcassi Etude under my fingers, and I almost have them memorized, I think. Tomorrow, I'll add another phrase or two working backwards from that ending section. The Sor Study offered up some interesting challenges, but I've at least figured out the fingerings in both hands for the entire piece, and I think I did a good job on bringing out the melody with the right hand. On "Pourpre," I added the "B" section, but I've got a little more work to do to get that under control. I will start with that piece tomorrow.

So, this practice thing is working for me, I think. Tomorrow, in addition to the classical work, I think I'll try my hand at some steel string playing (scales with a pick and some boom-chick-a-boom strumming patterns) for some variety.