This is the time of year when I usually decide to practice a lot of boring technical stuff. Scales in every key, arpeggios, simple etudes—basically, the stuff that's usually pretty difficult to execute in keys with lots of sharps and flats. I think that in my younger years, the combination of Easter (playing a lot of stuff in E major) and big youth orchestra concerts made me associate springtime with "difficult-to-play, sharp keys."
If you're a heavy SmartMusic user yourself, you may have done a lot of woodshedding already—setting up a never-ending repeat of a 2- or 4-measure phrase until it's played perfectly. Even better—perfectly done 7 times in a row. There's some psychological research from the 1950s that makes 7 a magic number for our memory, and a teacher telling me that years ago made it stick nicely in my head. I think he said it 7 times, too.
Pull up a tricky "Twister" exercise in SmartMusic and try the Loop feature. It can be especially challenging to speed up the tempo and loop it through the Circle of 5ths. Give those fingers a workout!
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Woodshedding in the Springtime!
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