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I’m sharing my final piece from the ABRSM syllabus Grade 2 titled Way Out West by Peter Letanka. Here’s the performance: The Journey This piece kept me really busy! I spent way longer on this than any other piece so far. The tempo is quite quick at 116bpm but with a “rolling lazy” feel in 6/8 timing. Bars 17-24 feel entirely different and I still struggle with this sounding right. It’s a complete contrast switch but the piece is great fun and unique to play. Unfortunately the sheet music is copyrighted and therefore only available to purchase. The ABRSM 2025/6 exam books contain it should you wish to read it. ...

It’s that time of year when Piano practicing includes something a bit more seasonal. My tutor gave me a basic arrangement of this classic Christmas song, which is something completely different to what I’ve previously learnt. I didn’t manage to get this polished for the holidays but it’s at least recognisable. I learnt various chords studying this piece and used the pedal. I’m still learning and trying to remember lifting between chord changes. This sheet music has no pedal markers or fingering which was great for studying and coming up with what I felt worked for me. ...

Universal SSL (free) doesn’t support multi-level subdomains I’ve battled another Cloudflare issue recently which is almost certainly due to my lack of experience with Cloudflare! However, I’m documenting it here for my own benefit and hopefully others. After migrating some of my applications that have staging versions of a backend API, I came across some domains that just wouldn’t resolve the SSL certificate. The error was simply ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH. ...

Overview In my day job, the wider team that I am a part of run a twice monthly informal-ish team meeting. The format is that we each take turns to host and cover various. These are mostly non-work related fun activities or discussions. It’s a good way for team bonding and getting to know each other better at a personal level, especially when we’re spread across various geographical regions. As my turn has come up again, I wanted to achieve something slightly different. In the past, we’ve covered our favourite books, films, music, our character traits and hosted quizzes. I wanted to come up with something that: ...

I’ve just come back from an amazing weekend at the Isle of Wight Festival 2025. I watched Faithless played on the Friday night (20th June) which was an incredible end of the night on the main stage. During the set, I was struck by an old song I haven’t heard for years with a great melody. I actually think I’ve heard the Paradiso Remix version before and not the actual song. Anyway the song is called “Drifting Away” which has this cool repetitive piano melody. Now I’m back in the land of living today, I went off to YouTube to find how to play it, but I couldn’t find any sheet music or video tutorials. ...

I’ve been away from recording progress recently but despite that, I have been keeping up with my Piano practice and learning. My excuse for not recording is mainly due to the jump in complexity from Grade 1 to 2. I’m also concurrently working on three pieces, Mozzie (this), Écossaise in G and Moderato since I last posted Anglefish. Here’s where I’m at with it so far. ...

Here is my first recording of an ABRSM Grade 2 piece 🐠 titled Angelfish. My tutor gave me this as one of the three Grade 2 pieces I’m currently working on. This piece is from the ABRSM 2021 & 2022 Piano Grade 2 syllabus (List C, No. 2) written by Anne Crosby Gaudet. As always, it’s very much a work in progress, but I wanted to share and document my progress so far. ...

I recently created a simple web-based tool to help visualize piano chords as part of my ongoing piano learning journey. The Piano Chord Explorer was built to quickly visualize chords for another project I’m working on, but I thought it might be helpful for others learning piano and music theory. The Tool The Piano Chord Explorer is a simple web application that displays piano chords and their inversions with sound playback. You can: ...

The third ABRSM grade 1 piece I’ve been learning is a piece titled Fresh Air by Andrew Eales. Again another unpolished performance but getting the notes and rhythm mostly right. As with all grade 1 pieces I’ve learnt so far, I know I still have work to do. The biggest issue being my dynamics and articulation. The Journey At first glance this looks like an easy piece (and of course, it is as it’s a grade 1) but there are a few things that kept catching me out. Holding doing the E whilst continuing playing other notes in bar 1, 3 etc… took my brain forever to get right. ...

I’m sharing my second recording of a ABRSM grade 1 piece 😱 titled Sneaky Business by Martha Mier. My tutor gave me this as my second piece to learn. This is from Jazz, Rags & Blues, Book 1 and is part of the ABRSM 2023 & 2024 Piano Grade 1 syllabus. Again it’s by no means a polished performance but happy with the progress and will continue to work on it but also move on to other piece. ...