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Hey everyone, I’m having a great time making the videos for my 31-Day Rock Piano for Beginners Workout Challenge on YouTube! In a sense, I’m going back to how I myself learned to play rock piano, when my friends and I formed a “garage band” at the age of 15. We didn’t know anything about … Read More

Day 4 of my 31-Day Rock Piano for Beginners Workout Challenge gets you playing rock piano accompaniments in a fun and rhythmically flexible way. Here’s the video – enjoy! Enter your email here to get your free copy of my ebook, Pop and Rock Accompaniment for Piano * indicates required Email Address *

The best way to become a fluent rock pianist is to dive right in and jam right away. Getting started is easier than you may think, and I’ve made a video to show how the notes in the A Blues Scale and how to use them to solo over rock grooves. In fact, we’ll spend … Read More

I’m noticing more and more these days that the traditional, effective way of learning piano improv styles has been reversed, and this is holding a lot of aspiring pianists back. Even more importantly, it’s preventing many of us from fully enjoying the process of playing music. All too often, piano study becomes 20 years of … Read More

Our journey through the Real Book has brought us to #162, which is Cole Porter’s great song “I Love Paris.” Playing a jazz interpretation of a song like “I Love Paris” leads us into fascinating places because the piece itself isn’t mainstream jazz, or even mainstream popular music of the 1950s, when it was composed. … Read More

Although we often hear how “wonderful” it is to play piano, and how “relaxing” is can be, the truth is that not every pianist experiences this. All too often, playing piano becomes the very source of stress we sought to avoid by learning music in the first place! I was reminded of this by an … Read More

One of the ironic aspects of musicianship is that many aspiring rock and blues pianists have trouble playing slow tempos. On the surface it seems like it would be easy, right? We usually think “Fast = difficult, slow = easy.” But in reality, it can be very challenging to feel comfortable playing at slow tempos. … Read More

Hey everyone! This week I’ve been thinking about “torch songs” because our Journey Through The Real Book has brought us to Duke Ellington’s masterpiece “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good.” There are several, varied definitions of the term “torch song” and the I’ve come to understand them is that they are ballads, often … Read More

Hey everyone! I began improvising jazz and rock music when I was 15 years old and my friends and I formed a “garage band.” When I think back on those days I feel lucky to have started in such a fun atmosphere, without being frontloaded by too much theory or having someone tell me “You … Read More

Do you have a musical fantasy? I started thinking about this a few months ago when I read how someone donated $250,000 to a charity for the opportunity to play drums with the rock group The Who. For one song!!!!! As much as I personally would like to play with The Who, it’ll probably never … Read More