A 3AM Practice Session

#1

(Megan Emerson: Start)

I can't sleep...

Megan thought to herself as she rolled over again under the covers. She had been trying her best to fall back asleep after waking up spontaneously in the middle of the night, but to no avail. Even with the sound of gently showering rain outside, she just was not going to fall back asleep.

She lifted her head out of the pillow, turned herself to the digital clock on the nightstand on her bed's right side, and pulled back her hair that had fallen over her face. She saw the neon-green numbers and let out a sigh; it was only 3:26 in the morning.

I swear it's been like that for 10 minutes! Megan closed her eyes and took in a deep breath before opening them again.

"Well," she said to herself, "maybe there's something I can do to pass the time." She rose off of her bed on the right side, turned on the lamp on the nightstand, and scanned her room to get ideas.

Megan's bare feet felt the sea of clothes that were scattered around the room so much that the white carpeting was only visible through a few patches in the relatively small room. She never felt motivated to keep a well organized room since it does not get a lot of traffic unless a friend happens to be there. As such, unless it became a room commonly witnessed on Hoarders, Megan tried to put it off until later.

And with that, she turned a bit to her right and walked towards her simple wood bookcase stacked with various novels and works she has collected over the years, or she has "borrowed" from her mother and never returned to her. As much as Megan loved reading, she did not particularly feel like it tonight. Besides, she's already read all of her collection twice or even as much as five times cover-to-cover.

At that moment, she looked right and noticed her black Yamaha keyboard her grandfather gave to her set up on a stand with its back facing the window in the corner. "Yes!" Megan whispered to herself as she went back to her bookcase to grab her headphones so she would not disturb her family, whom she felt a little jealous of for their sleep tonight.

I mean, it still counts as practice at 3 in the morning, right? Besides, I know just what I want to practice on...

Megan sat down on her simple wooden stool (that was a little chilly from the cool room), inserted her headphone's prong into the jack, turned up the keyboard's volume output, and began to get to work as the rain continued to come down.

First, Megan started out with simple scale runs. Today was a Circle of Fourths day, so she whipped out her best C, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, and Gb scales three times each, all from memory. For some reason, Megan had a hard time getting the high flat scales perfectly, so a few of the attempts on the later ones came out quite a bit shaky. However, she decided to press on.

To continue with warming up, Megan reached under and pulled out a songbook filled with basic 4-voice chorales. She opened it to a random page, placed the book on the keyboard's music stand positioned on the back, and played three of them. Megan tried her best to make the short, simple exercises sound as musical as possible, but she knew there was only so much you could do with a synthesizer set at a specific volume. That was one of the only things she hated compared to playing an actual piano like the one in Aurora High's band room.

After the chorales, Megan was ready to begin. She placed the songbook down under the keyboard, put down her headphones, and walked back over to the bookshelf. She pulled out a bright red plastic folder that had a white sheet of paper reading "Video Game Songs" out of the third shelf and returned to the keyboard. Megan placed the black headphones back on her head and sat down.

Megan flew open the folder and quickly skimmed through the various masterpieces from video games she has gathered via the internet and printed out, ranging from "Bloody Tears" from Castlevania: Simon's Quest all the way to "Want You Gone" from Portal 2. Even though these were all good choices to play for fun in the early morning hours, there was one Megan had printed out a few days ago that she felt was perfect for a rainy, sleepless night like this.

And then Megan saw it - "Song of Healing" from Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Megan almost felt like crying as she set the music on the stand. She knew that tonight would be the night she would learn it. She took a deep breath and began.

Megan played the first chord printed on the sheet, and as she moved on through the song, she felt a sense of melancholy from the sad tune, along with the appropriate background of rain beyond the window. As such, she tried to take advantage of this and put a little "feeling" into it through rubato and, as hard as she could, dynamic shifts. Soon enough, it was all over in a matter of minutes.

"Not bad!" Megan said to herself quietly as she pulled back and relaxed on her seat. Internally, she felt like jumping out of that seat and rushing around the room in excitement, even though she knew she messed up a few notes here and there, but that was besides the point! Megan learned the Song of Healing, and she felt very proud of herself as she always does learning something new.

However, Megan knew this was the easy part; now she had to iron out individual sections until she could play it perfectly all the way through and in reverse. But...she felt that this was for another time (preferably not one at 4 in the morning). As such, Megan spun around and looked back at her clock.

3:53

Megan felt like banging her head on the keyboard in agony, but resisted. She let out another heavy sigh as she looked on through the water-stained window and absorbed the symphony of the rain shower.

(Megan Emerson continued in: Circle of Fifths)