and again

My goal was to work on the Shostie and then spend a good amount of time on some of my exercises ... I played for about an hour and found myself getting frustrated on the exercises, trying to play them too fast. So I stopped.

On the Shostakovich, however, on that long chromatic scale, it was absolutely the coolest. I listened on the CD and I have been playing it way too fast, way too fast. It went just fine, and I played it over and over and over. My poor neighbors, I have been doing this a lot lately, putting myself in my very own practice loop, playing a passage again and again, and again. In fact, I did that on my Beeler Allegreto exercise today, too, and it was quite productive.

One reason that I may have been getting frustrated was most likely that I was getting tired - I was starting to mess up notes that were just plain silly to mess up. Also, one down side of putting myself into a practice loop like that, especially with fast passages, is that I feel like it increases my blood pressure! I get tense!