hi all,

It's been almost a year since I started playing the piano last December. Of course, the tutorials on this site have been very helpful, Arthur, thank you!

I'd like to share here what I've been able to do in the past year, and I hope it will be useful to others who are beginners like me.

Boogie Woogie Stomp

Boogie Woogie Stomp was my first attempt at boogie woogie, so I can say that it was relatively very difficult. It's not a tricky rhythm, so once your fingers learn the form, you can play it, but it was a challenge. In particular, I had a very hard time with the walking bass on the left hand from the middle part of the tune.

Swanee River Boogie

I thought that since Swanee River Boogie is same key as Boogie Woogie Stomp, I wouldn't have as much hard time as I got with Boogie Woogie Stomp. However, Swanee River Boogie has a lot of variations in the right hand rhythm, and it was very difficult to play expressively with arpeggios and grace notes.

Dr. John's Pinetop Boogie

Pinetop Boogie, unlike the previous two tunes, is key Eb. It requires a lot of black keys, and fingering is very difficult. The atmosphere of the tune was also completely different from the previous ones, so it was hard to adjust my feeling to it. I think it will take a lot of practice to perfect my performance.

Answer To The Boogie

The key is F, so I had a lot of new things to learn and it was very difficult. Does Pete Johnson have very large hands? my hands are rather small, so I had to strain to spread my fingers and play at a fast pace, so this tune was also very difficult.

Conclusion

All the tunes are very difficult and I'm still not playing them well enough, but I'm having a great time playing boogie-woogie and I'm very happy with how far I've come in a year. I've been so focused on just playing the tunes that I haven't done much basic practice (I think this is the reason why my playing is unstable and lacks intonation). So from now on, I'm going to polish my basic skills and work hard to improve my performance.

thank you,