Time + Groove Week 1 Day 2 Agenda
20 min 20-minute session

2026-02-27: Week 1 Day 2 — Time

Feb 27, 2026

Songs worked
Fly Me to the Moon

Wins

  • The Charleston-rhythm loop felt fine overall
  • Able to combine time + chord changes + some melody (even if slow)

Still working on

  • Need to play very slow to avoid mistakes
  • Sometimes struggle switching quickly, especially to A7/C#
#piano#practice#week-1#fly-me-to-the-moon#charleston#comping

Pre-practice ritual (10 sec): visualize one clean voicing move and hear your first phrase before touching keys.

What I practiced

  • ~20 minutes.
  • Practiced the chord progression for Fly Me to the Moon, playing in time and adding the melody for the first ~12 bars.
  • Finished with an 8-bar loop focusing on Charleston rhythm while playing chords with both hands.

Insights

This trained layering (time + harmony + melody) and quick left/right-hand coordination while comping.

Next time (tiny): isolate the A7/C# move (2–3 shapes only) and drill it as a mini-loop before putting it back into the 8 bars.

Teacher assessment

Good priorities today: you kept the harmony in time and started layering melody on top, which is exactly where this tune becomes real music. The fact that you need to go slow right now isn’t a problem—it’s your nervous system asking for cleaner shape-changes before you speed up. Your clearest bottleneck is the speed/accuracy of chord-to-chord shape switching, highlighted by the A7/C# inversion. Next session, don’t try to “fix everything” inside the full tune: take just the 2–3 bars around A7/C# and loop them until the switch is boring. Constraint: keep the rhythm simple (even just shells on beats 1–3) while you lock the left-hand shape, then re-add Charleston. If you want a measurable win, do one clean pass at a set slow tempo (metronome) and only then nudge the tempo +2–4 bpm.