In 1999, I invested $500 into my first business. Today, that seems like no big deal but at the time, I was very scared even though I was making a very good living in software and did not need the money. My hangup came from life conditioning that I had received in which I had been […]
I recently noticed that my channel on YouTube has gone over 5 million views. By some standards, that is not very many views but from a business standpoint, YouTube has been very good to me. This is going to be a business post about my history there. For those of you that are professional musicians, […]
A few weeks ago, I posted part one in an interview with my piano teacher Ted Howe in which we discussed his background. Today, I want to post part 2 in which we talk about some thoughts on what pianists in general need to be working on. Specifically, Ted talks about playing by ear, harmony/voicing, […]
I want to write one more post about the Composers Symposium I went to last week because there is another thing that made a big impression on me: how difficult it is to write a good melody. Melody writing is hard because frankly there are really not many solid rules. It is not like the […]
As I mentioned in my last post, I was at the Composers Symposium last week meeting with other writers and publishers. One of the big things we did was introduce our music to each other and get publisher feedback. In the room were decision makers for Hal Leonard, Lorenz, Fred Bock and probably other publishers […]
I spent this week at the Composers Symposium at Pine Lake Music in Atlanta, an event where church music publishers and writers learn from each other, present songs to each other, network, and in general, laugh a lot. If you know much about me, you know that I have never been published. There are good reasons for […]
I am in the middle of recording my new project and last week, took some time to learn Melodyne. Melodyne is an amazing piece of software that allows you to manipulate individual notes inside of a sound file. That sounds like a big deal because it is. Think of it this way. Let’s say that you […]
I often find myself stuck between the past and the present. There are people in the present who want to throw out all the music from the past as if they came up with their music on their own without help from the past. Then there are those who want to throw out all of the music […]
I enjoy debate and I like interacting with people I disagree with if the dialogue is thoughtful and intelligent. But the sad reality is that most debate that you will experience does not qualify as thoughtful or intelligent. There is little grounding in logic and truth even though the participants themselves may be thoughtful and intelligent. I […]
I have not written a lot about how I think pianists should look when they play the piano. That is partly because I don’t consider myself an expert. I have never been completely comfortable with what I do in that area. But today, I want to talk about that a bit. Two competing thoughts come […]
This weekend, I had a concert and because it was Mother’s Day, I was asked to play some from my project Heirloom. Typically, I don’t do any of that stuff in concerts because it is more designed to put people asleep than keep them awake. In fact, I haven’t played any song on that project […]