I reached the two-year mark in learning the recorder! After the first year, I am still continuing on my journey of learning music with that instrument.
When rechecking my history on YouTube and Amazon, I saw that I began watching videos on April 1, 2024 and bought my first plastic soprano on April 3, 2024. It all now feels a little bit like a joke in retrospect, but I still have the same motivation as at the beginning.

Practice

As I wrote last year, practice makes perfect… and I practiced every day. That is still true today.
I still try to play 30 minutes to one hour every day, alternating between the soprano and the alto recorder, but due to the repertoire I am working on, I find myself playing the alto more than the soprano, although I still find the soprano more “ergonomic”.

Like last year, it is still very far from an “optimized” practice:

• I still tend to go too fast and do everything in one go
• although I use the metronome, I prefer doing it without it… even though I know it is less effective in the long term
• I need to take more time without the instrument to study the piece first and focus on the difficult passages

Continuing with a teacher

I am still continuing with the same teacher as at the beginning, with a one-hour lesson every week.
I sometimes wonder if switching teachers may be more “effective” and give me another point of view on my practice, but I know I am still improving, and because we know each other better, it is easier, as she now knows my level and limits and can give me adapted exercises and content… which was not true at the beginning (I still remember a piece that was hard for me at the time, called Duo Quarto Tono).

As we regularly work on new pieces, it keeps the motivation going, and I do not have to find new pieces with increasing difficulty myself. That also helps me improve little by little.
We recently started playing full sonatas (well, little by little). The last one was Sonate 1 opus 1 in A minor by Jean-Baptiste Loeillet de Gant, and I am currently studying Sonate IV by Jean-Joseph Mouret.

I also regularly play with my friend who gave me the wooden recorders. It adds more challenge to everything I work on!

Adding more nuance and ornamentation

My teacher has started adding more nuance to the pieces I am working on. This adds much more challenge than just the piece by itself.
She is adding new ornamentations, changing from piano to forte and vice versa in different parts of the music to make it livelier, calmer, or to better emphasize the other recorder when we play together.

I must say I am still a little lost about how to modify a piece correctly, but understanding it is not a main goal for now, and I think I will understand it better as I continue learning.

Improving my techniques

I also try to constantly improve my technique, but it feels like a never-ending journey with many things to improve.

Breathing

I often take it for granted, but it is far from simple. I still need to practice blowing air correctly, alternating from slow to fast air when switching notes, and also breathe correctly depending on the speed of the music I am playing. I try to do some breathing exercises without the instrument… although I must admit the exercises are pretty random

Fingering

I am still improving fingering for ornamentations and trills, as well as alternative fingerings when needed. The latest challenge being the highest F sharp on the alto when I need to close the bell with my knee… and be careful with my teeth

Tonguing

As with breathing, I am also trying to improve tonguing, by being faster and more precise, as well as using various double-tonguing techniques where I can. It is still very difficult to do it and switch during a piece, compared to just doing it in exercises

Getting more familiar with music

Reading music is a lot easier

Compared to last year, I can sight-read music much more than before, at least to some extent.
I need much less time to start a piece and get “up to speed” than before. Moreover, for easy pieces of music, I can “just play them” not too quickly the first time I see them, and I must say I am quite happy to be able to do it (and keep improving on it).

This also makes learning much easier, as I tend to be a bit less frustrated when studying a piece for the first time and taking a long time to decipher the notes.

Starting to remember music

As reading music got a lot easier, I also started to remember some pieces without the score.
Being able to play without the score is something that I struggled with for a very long time, and I never quite had time to practice it. But now I am able to:

• remember a new piece a little bit (well, a very easy one)
• remember some bits of old pieces that I worked on before

I am quite happy with the result.

Rhythm is still the hardest

I feel that “my rhythm” has greatly improved too. Although it is clearly far, far from good.
I still have the very bad practice of going too fast, and accelerating in some passages, making a whole piece kind of unstable.

However, I can now have a steady rhythm for “easy pieces of music”, and both come together much more easily.

No more recorders

Unlike last year, there were no more recorders this year!

I settled on using Yamaha Ecodear recorders (alto and soprano) for daily practice. I found them the most stable and the closest in “behavior” (I would not say sound) to the wooden recorders my friend gave me two years ago.
I alternate randomly with the wooden ones depending on my mood.

My friend also showed me a few months ago how to oil the wooden recorders and take care of the instruments. It is not a routine yet, but I do it from time to time.

Onto year three

After two years, I am still hooked on the recorder, but I also started opening up a bit more to different kinds of music. I try to play some pieces together with some colleagues who also sing, play piano, or play the oud, but it is still focused on the classical repertoire.

Like last year, I also try to attend a few concerts. One of the best ones last year was when my friend (the colleague who plays the oud) invited me to watch Le Trio Joubran at the Olympia for their twentieth anniversary. It was a fantastic experience, and I got to listen to music I am not very familiar with.
On the recorder side, the most notable one was the concert and workshop with Lucie Horsch in Pully.

I tried playing the erhu a bit on a whim as my father had one. Knowing a bit of music, it was much easier to start “from scratch”, but the instrument is quite challenging in itself, and at the time of writing, I do not have the same “spark” as with the recorder.
So I leave it aside for now, maybe I will pick it up again later.

For now, I am happily continuing to play the recorder, solo, with my teacher, or with my friend. Until next year.