I spent yesterday looking at pianos–12 hours of looking in fact. Here in Atlanta, we have lots of dealers and we hit them all. The brands we played were Schimmel, Kawai (including their elite line Shigero), Steinway, Boston, Yamaha, Bosendorfer, Seiler, and Estonia. We played a lot of the cheaper brands too (Baldwin, Hailun, Knabe, […]
Category Archives: Free Lessons
Twenty years ago today, I woke up at my parents home and went to eat breakfast. Even though I had just graduated from college, the economy was bad and I had been working a $6.00/hour landscaping job. But after breakfast, I did not go to my landscaping job. Rather, I loaded a car with most […]
I was watching an argument a few days ago about a guy who is sort of a religious extremist. His fans and detractors were bickering back and forth about how to deal with him and I kept hearing the “smart” label thrown around. Apparently since he is smart, some think that we all need to […]
One of the challenging things about music theory is the fact that it is a moving target. In other words, it is not a clear cut discipline in the way that mathematics might be. In math, 2+2 will always be 4 regardless of the time period or culture. That is not true with music. I […]
Our lives are frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify. – Henry David Thoreau I am an admirer of Henry David Thoreau, an American writer during the 1800’s. Thoreau was a philosopher who is most famous for his ideas about simplicity. He is known as the guy who went and lived in the woods for a […]
If you missed yesterday’s post, I started talking about the turnaround. A turnaround is a sequence of chords that are used at the end of a section that fill up space and naturally lead to the start of the next section. As a simple example, if you end a section on a I chord and […]
There is a foundational principle in harmony and it goes something like this: the path between two chords can be altered in many ways as long as the end points are preserved. That may sound confusing but let’s take an example. Let’s say you are in church and you end a verse of a hymn […]
I am going to give you a very powerful tip today and it will not take me very much time to explain it. It is very important though. Here is a bit of background first. I grew up playing classical music. I am thankful for the teachers I had but they were all very much […]
This is a followup to this article I wrote a month or so ago about productivity. For better or worse, we have a central vacuum in our house. From my perspective, it is just a normal vacuum cleaner except that it requires a lot of maintenance and costs a lot of money when it something […]
I saw this image floating around the internet today and it made me pause. Then I started asking myself if this witty saying is really true? Is entrepreneurship really like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down? The answer is no. Don’t get me wrong. That may be the way […]
We all know people that seem unbelievably productive and we know people who just don’t ever seem to get much done at all. Have you ever wondered what the difference is? I don’t have all the answers and I am pretty convinced that there is no one secret formula. Some people are ultra-productive because they […]