Funky scales

I practice about two to two and a half hours most days. About an hour of that is taken up with finger exercises and scales. They are necessary if I want to improve my technique, but they can get tedious pretty quickly. I recently started trying to think of ways to make my technique exercises more interesting (thereby improving my focus and helping me improve faster). About a month ago, I made a list of variations on scales, which I have been sampling from when I get bored. It has helped me with my focus, but scales are still sort of tedious. Today, I tried out the "beat pattern" setting on my digital piano. Wow! It is a real challenge to maintain a steady tempo while your metronome is playing something funk-a-doodle! I can now play a slow-but-steady eighth note, triplet, or sixteenth-note pattern against a triplet plus dotted eighth pattern, at least in the key of B major (the key of the week).

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