3 Piano Improvisations ~Anyone~ Can Do!

What is Improvising?

To improvise means to make music up on the spot and can be intimidating for beginner musician and seasoned professional alike. While all the great composers were known for their abilities as skilled improvisers, the tradition of classical music really doesn’t give us the space to explore it today.

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10 Ways to Improve Your Sight Reading

Who hasn’t been impressed by someone who can sit down, open up a book of music at any spot, and start playing as if they’d been practising it for weeks?

Sight reading is the ability to read music at first sight. That’s right, music you’ve never seen or heard before.

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How I “Accidentally” Became a University Music Student

They say that life never moves in a straight line. Although I’ve always been an industrious student, I’ve never really had a clear sense about where I was going when it came to a career. At one point in time I wanted to become a pilot, I even did the ground school for it. But for some reason that, like many things, never materialized. In my final year of high school it came time to decide what to do next.

Of course, there was always music. I had played piano most of my life, and when I wasn’t Continue reading

A Little Piano

Image: Mon Shop Vintage

Musicians don’t always come from musical families. My uncle Leif, on my mother’s side, was a trained baritone, guitarist, and music teacher, so I knew the music gene was in there somewhere. But my parents were not trained musicians, though they liked listening to Elvis, John Denver, and the 3 Tenors, and my mother did enjoy singing and playing the autoharp.

This fact didn’t hinder my dad, when they met with a new piano teacher who wanted to know more about the parents.

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In the Key of “Feeling”

During my mid teens, I remember performing Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor for the grade 9 piano category in Guelph Kiwanis Music Festival. There was a good handful of students in this class. I didn’t have a lot of experience performing in competition, so as with many young performers, my nerves got the best of me.

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My Very First “Piano Teacher”

Something that I don’t mention in my personal bio is my experience with my first piano teacher.

When I was 5 my parents enrolled me in a local music school which they had thought was an extension of the Royal Conservatory of Music. Though the name was similar it was everything but, as we discovered over the next couple of years.

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