Category: Music Education

After I started writing a few songs, I had a chance to play some of them for a couple of friends who were professional musicians. Don is a professional piano player who has accompanied many well-known artists.  He was also one of my mom’s piano students when he was first getting his start.  He suggested to me that I might consider recording some of my songs.  It was relatively easy to do without much investment.  I had played around with some home recording before and had been happy with the results.  But I knew there were many advancements that had been made in the years since with digital recording and I thought it might be worth looking at.

Starting in high school and though college, I had more opportunities to play at weddings and other events where I had to play songs on piano where I wasn’t just accompanying myself singing.  Sometimes these were instrumentals where I could cheat and play in a more comfortable key.  Other times, I was playing for someone else to sing. When that was the case, it was more important to play in the correct key.  This was always a challenge.

There were several times when I was growing that mom started teaching me piano.  I wouldn’t practice as often as I should, and I never made it very far into the lesson books to anything advanced. At some point, mom negotiated with Mrs. Dean Norville to give my sister and I piano lessons and in return, she would give lessons to “Miss Dean’s” girls. This seemed to be a better plan for getting me to practice and learn something that I would use the rest of my life.

While I was able to play songs on the organ and accompany myself singing on the piano, there were still limitations to what I was able to play.  My dirty secret was that I only knew how to play songs in the key of F.  I think part of this was due to the way the pedals were on the organ.  The organ had a limited range of pedals, usually an octave going from C to C. I would typically use an F-C bass line when playing an F chord and it just felt like the organ was made to play in this key.  Of course, I was just playing what sounded and felt good. I had no idea what key I was playing in. 

The exception to this rule was when I was playing a song in a minor chord.  It felt most natural to play these songs in D minor. 

My mom developed a close relationship with the owners of the music store where she bought sheet music and lesson books for her piano students.  At one point, she worked out a deal with them where they placed an electric organ in our house for demonstration purposes.  If someone came to our house and ended up buying an organ from the music store, mom would get a commission.  I don’t think she sold that many organs, but it was a nice way for us to be able to have an organ in our house before we bought one.

As I was growing up, I continued to pick around on the piano. Occasionally, my mom would start giving me lessons, but I never stuck with them for very long. I wasn’t disciplined enough to stick with practicing the easy songs that were necessary to develop skills needed to play more complicated music.  When I was sitting at the piano, I was more likely to experiment with doing things that sounded more like a real song. 

I don’t know where my first guitar came from.  I suspect that my mom got it from the music store where she bought sheet music when she gave piano lessons. I remember getting a Mel Bay guitar instruction book that showed some simple instructions and chords.  As with most other instruments, I would teach myself how to play.  But I wouldn’t take to the guitar as easily as I did either the ukulele or the baritone ukulele.  For both the ukes, I always played chords.  And on all the chords, I would strum all the strings.  On guitar, you don’t always strum all strings when playing chords. I found it difficult to only hit the strings that needed to be played.