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Cameron Abrahamson.mp4

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Since the lesson on 05/11 was cancelled, Campos opted to move the lessons to Saturday 05/14 after our extra rehearsal for Mudra. I requested to spend this week's lesson entirely on marimba, because I needed to practice the spacing and intervals on the 5 octave marimba, since that is what we are playing on for the percussion concert. During this lesson, (and the prior rehearsal), I learned that I need to relax a lot more on marimba, and to tape all of my mallets as much as I can. This will help with wrist and arm pain, as well as playing for long periods of time (which is the case with mudra).

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Nothing too noteworthy happened this lesson; I gave a passable performance of my assigned snare and timpani etudes. On snare, Campos taught me a way to practice my roughs on snare, that is to play them as flams and then play them as roughs without changing the timing of each stick. I was also assigned Timpani Etude #7.

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Light review work on snare and timpani for the piece assigned to me this week. ~20 minutes.

Marimba: 30 minutes working on the Grandioso section of Michi, as well as the right hand octave section before it.

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Marimba: ~15 minutes of work in the middle section of Strive to be Happy, and another 15 minutes of work performing full runs of Michi.

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Marimba: ~50 minutes of work on the grandioso section in Michi, followed by full runs of Michi and Strive to be happy.

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Marimba: ~30 minutes of full run work on michi and Strive to be happy.

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Marimba: 30 minutes, scales and refreshing “Strive to be Happy”

Snare: 15 minutes: flam/rough work on solo #5 in All-American Snare drummer.

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Today was spent almost exclusively on timpani, focusing on the piece with tuning. Thankfully, the tuning is coming more easily and I'm confident about playing the piece at my lesson tonight. I also briefly touched on marimba before the wind ensemble students took it outside to use in rehearsal. Today's practicing lasted for roughly an hour.

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Today was spent mostly on Timpani and Marimba, with a lot of work going into a piece on timpani which requires sitting down and tuning while playing. On Marimba, I once again focused on playing Strive to be Happy and that one section of Michi. This session lasted for about 45 minutes.

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Today I visited the practice room to work on my snare and timpani assignments for this week. Both are going well; the pieces are difficult but the progress is tangible, thankfully. This practice session lasted for about half an hour.

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Today I spent a lot of time dusting off one of my old pieces and working on Michi. The old piece I'm trying to shake the rust off of is called "Strive to be Happy" by Ivan Trevino and I played it for my Fall 2021 Jury. Thankfully, the piece is coming back to me well so it shouldn't be too difficult to play at the Percussion concert in June.

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I continue to make seldom apparent improvements in the material I practice. This practice session was almost two hours of nothing but anger and frustration resulting from lack of progress. Most of it was spent on marimba, where I tried to work on the same section in the same way that Campos and I worked on it during the lesson, and it almost seemed worse no matter how much I played it or how slowly I did. I eventually gave up and moved to snare drum where again little progress was made; stumbling on the same measure again and again and again without it ever seeming to improve. After about twenty minutes of this I eventually gave up and headed home after being in the combo room for an hour and forty minutes.

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Because I hadn't practiced as much as I should have this week, this lesson resulted in a lot of frustration towards myself, initially for my lack of progress in my playing and skill, then after realizing why I was at a deficit in those aspects, anger for how lazy and unmotivated I was the past week. I realize that it's entirely my fault that I hadn't practiced as much as I should have but the question arises within myself why I act this way; am I really this lazy? Am I just not as skilled of a musician I thought I was? Self-doubt makes these sorts of thoughts very difficult to deal with and lead me to genuinely consider if I'm in the wrong field or not. As for what we actually practiced during the lesson, I gave a mediocre performance of my timpani etudes, a better-than-I-thought performance of both snare solo 3 and 4, and worked some more slowly on that one difficult section of Michi. The aforementioned frustration began during this work on Michi due to how little progress I was making.

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This practice session was spent mostly in frustration given how little progress I made in my snare solos, and I spent most of my 45 minutes this day on that. The last ~10 minutes of practice were spent on timpani.

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Because I had access to the marimba at school, I focused mainly on Michi today by running through the few parts that were giving me trouble. This took about fifteen minutes before I moved on to timpani for the next 20 minutes, after which I left.

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On this day I focused more on my snare solos, and I found that solo #3 was giving me a lot more trouble than solo #4. I continued working on it for another ~15 minutes with little apparent progress. I also made certain to touch on my timpani etudes as well, the newest of which is at a very quick tempo which is happily not too much of a problem to me.

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This practice session consisted mainly of me moving on through my timpani etudes, reading through the next one that was assigned to me, and starting to read through the next two snare solos that were assigned, those being Solo #s 3 and 4. This all took me about 40 minutes.

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Today I stopped into the practice room after school with the goal of practicing Michi for a while, which I did and wound up with some minor frustrations with a certain difficult part of the piece. I also practiced my assigned timpani etudes for about twenty minutes.

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Not too much of note happened this lesson; I played the pieces I was assigned well enough, we did some work on the snare and timpani pieces, and finished with some slow marimba work on a specific section of "Michi" that was giving me a lot of trouble.

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Today I stopped through the practice room to do some heavy timpani work, as I hadn't done so yet this week. I learned the next solo and tightened up the previous one in about half an hour, and felt really good about my progress. I then moved on to "Michi" for another half hour, focusing mainly on a section with large octave leaps in my left hand which has been the most difficult part of the piece for me.

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After rehearsal Thursday night, the pain in my wrists has completely gone away, and I've come to the conclusion that, as was also mentioned briefly by Campos, if I keep my hands moving more often, I'll be less prone to those types of wrist pains.

Today I decided to forgo practicing in the combo room on campus and went home to practice snare and marimba.

I worked on "Michi" for about an hour, and moved on to work on the next two snare solos for roughly another hour. Throughout the rest of the night, spurred on by watching videos of Evelyn Glennie performing "Michi," I continued practicing the solo off and on, eventually playing my first successful FULL run-through of the piece.

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Today I got about half an hour of marimba practice in before I had to leave for work.

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Professor Campos couldn't make it to campus on Wednesday, so our lesson was postponed to Thursday, the 14th.

Upon beginning the lesson, I immediately opened up to Campos about my wrist pains, to which he showed me some good wrist stretches and warm-up routines. We then moved on to timpani, which went fine, then we finished with looking at some snare material, and that went about the same way.
Finally, we ended the lesson by making tentative plans for my Jury performances; concluding that in these next few weeks I'll be moving through two "All-American Snare Drummer" solos per week, and one "Intermediate Timpani AND Snare Studies" etude per week.

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Same as yesterday, I decided not to practice in order to give my hands a break.

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Today I decided to forgo practice and rest my hands for a couple of days as the pain in my wrist has not stopped.

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Since last Thursday,(04/07) my right wrist has been giving me a lot of pain. Today I managed to get half an hour of timpani and fifteen minutes of snare practice in before having to call it because my wrist hurt so much.

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Today, I only got in about half an hour of marimba practice before I had to leave for work.

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Not necessarily a current one, but Ringo was one of the main reasons I became a percussionist in the first place, and was also the Beatle that I resonated most with. The things he does on the drum kit were very out of the box and creative; using every part on the kit as a piece of the composition and not overplaying. This is something I can definitely incorporate into my practicing, as I tend to just fall into a groove and not vary much from it. To approach this change, I will have to start by simply sitting down at the kit more, as I have stopped recently as I don't feel I'm skilled enough and don't like people hearing me play.

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World's Great Drummers Salute Ringo Starr

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If you're a mallet percussionist of any sort, I've found that there's a lot to be owed to Keiko Abe. Being the INVENTOR of the five octave marimba in partnership with Yamaha, We have Keiko to thank for the modern form of the marimba that so many high schools and colleges around the world use. Something I can (possibly) incorporate into my playing is experimenting with different ways to hit the keys. Here, Keiko uses large dowel-type mallets to hit the keys and invoke a bamboo sound, as well as hitting the shaft of the mallet on the edge of the upper keys.

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This is an audio recording of Evelyn Glennie's  performance of the piece "Michi" by Keiko Abe. Something that really inspires me about this piece is the dynamic contrast. Campos once mentioned to me that when doing a crescendo at the beginning of this piece, I should start with almost no sound and build up to what Glennie does here. As for things I can incorporate into my own playing, Glennie improvises the beginning quite a bit more than I do, as I tend to stick more to what's written with a few added ideas here and there. Perhaps changing the beginning more can help to make my performance stand out a bit more.
As for approaching this change, I think something I can do is to challenge myself to play the beginning differently each time I do.

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Today I visited the practice room and spent roughly 30 minutes on timpani, writing in the stickings for Etude #2 in Intermediate Snare Drum Studies, and chunking through it.
I moved on to snare for about 15 minutes, quickly looking over the first and second solo. I did not play much marimba today.

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This lesson was a marked improvement over the last one. We spent much less time talking about things and more time playing. Because of that, we actually got to touch on every instrument during the lesson, something I don't think we've done all semester. We began with Timpani, and I was caught off guard with Campos' request to for me to play Etude #2 out of "Intermediate Timpani Studies" by Mitchell Peters. After stumbling through it and spending some time with him working on it, he told me to continue working on it as well as to move on to Etude #3. Moving on to snare, my work on the first two solos out of "All-American Snare Drummer" paid off a little less than I had hoped; I stumbled in some spots and my technique still wasn't quite up to snuff in Campos' eyes. He assigned me solo #3 and asked me to continue in "Intermediate Snare Drum Studies." Finally, on marimba, we touched lightly on the Bach fugue that was assigned to me over the winter intercession.
Footnote: Campos made it clear to me in this lesson that I haven't been doing my practice records quite in the way I was required to. (sorry Dr. Marston!) So from here on, I'll be filling them in day-to-day with times and what exactly I practiced.

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Following the large stress put upon myself during week 4 and the relieving lesson on March 30th, my practicing remained consistent and strong, with at least half an hour spent each day after school in the practice room, working on my timpani and snare technique. However, I'm finding that without really even realizing it, I've not been devoting enough time to marimba, so over the next practice week I'll have to play mallets a lot more.

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The past week of practice had been very rough for me, specifically the night of Monday, 03/28. On that night, the topic of future plans and career logistics was brought up with my family and I fell into quite an anxious state because I am still very much aimless about where I'm going after Mt. Sac and this is a large source of stress for me. This culminated in the following day after having a less than ideal day in my musicianship class (which didn't help), where I went into the practice room and broke down. After composing myself, I began to practice with perhaps even too much vigor and intensity out of anxiety and fear of incompetency. I spoke this all to Campos on Wednesday night at our lesson and I am very grateful to have someone like him to speak with on this subject, since he has taken a very similar road as I. He consoled me, spoke about career options, and recommended counseling on campus for anxiety-related reasons and I am inclined to partake, but have not yet found the time.

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Remaining consistent with my after class practicing, this week was spent with much more focus on snare following the events of the previous lesson. I printed out "The All-American Snare Drummer" and have been reading out of it daily. I also make sure to play some timpani each time I'm in the room, and given that I don't have any at my house, I can't get very productive practice done with timpani on weekends; only mon-thur.

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It is very much my own fault that I hadn't practiced snare up until this point in the semester, which resulted in a session of snare playing which consisted of me stumbling and sight reading my way through the first etude of "The All-American Snare Drummer," (which I was reading off of my phone because I had failed to print it out during the previous week of practice). Things began looking up, however, once we moved on to timpani. My timpani technique has been improving quite a bit and I can comfortably move through right hand movement and left hand movement etudes. We did not end up having time to look at my marimba pieces this lesson.

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This week I didn't practice as much as I would've wanted to, but I have become more consistent with practicing at school after my classes.

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Following my first lesson, I practiced my timpani technique as much as I could and attempted to read through more of "Michi." Because Professor Campos fell sick during this time, our 03/09 lesson had to be cancelled, so I became somewhat aimless during the second week of practice as I felt I had already achieved the goals set for me during the last lesson.

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This lesson was spent quite a bit more on playing; though Campos did discuss my last rehearsal with my students a little bit. After that, we spent half the lesson going over timpani where I continued to struggle somewhat with my timpani technique. For the last bit of rehearsal, we played a marimba solo I'm working on; a very difficult piece called "Michi." While moving through a soft and intricate part of the piece, Campos reminded me to breathe while I play and during a more intense section, he trained me on relaxing my mallets and just letting them drop onto the keyboard to get a loud (heavy) sound.

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This lesson was spent mostly talking with Professor Campos regarding one of my semester goals; that being teaching the students I'm coaching better. Campos had much to say on the topic of teaching percussion, and we only ended up playing for the last ~15 minutes of rehearsal. This playing was spent going over staccato stroke on timpani.

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To achieve these goals, I have a few short term and long term things in mind.

My first goal definitely goes a little bit deeper than just my musical career, as I've been too hard on myself for a very long time and it will be a hard habit to break. Given that, this specific goal will definitely be a long-term plan: simply to look at the positives and what I had accomplished after each practice session, and to write them down. Hopefully this will help me start looking at the positives more.

For my second goal, the fix is a bit easier and more immediate. I have the ability and opportunity to practice for AT LEAST half an hour every day of the week, but I find that I don't do so very often because I'm either tired, or lazy, or didn't bring my music and/or equipment to school on a given day. For this semester, I will hold myself to practicing every day after classes, and after work on the weekends.

Lastly is something that is already in motion, as thankfully my individual instructor, Ariel Campos, once did the very same thing I'm currently doing; I spoke this goal to him and he agreed to talk to me every so often about teaching percussion.

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My three goals for this semester are:
1. To become more patient and forgiving with myself while practicing,
2. Practice more consistently, not longer, and
3. To learn how to better teach the students in the High School Marching Band I'm coaching for.