Piano Note

“If I hear Jingle Bells one more time I’m going to jump off a cliff!” -Rhiannon Schmitt, December, 1997.

I had just immigrated to Canada one month earlier as a self-employed musician. I made my living by playing hours of Christmas music at malls, craft fairs and parties. I was happy to have the work, but the long hours playing lively violin carols were physically and mentally exhausting.

I started to keep track of how many times I played Jingle Bells that season and lost count somewhere around 200. Every night as I tried to fall asleep, the annoying chorus rang deafeningly in my ears. My digits involuntarily twitched and repeated the irritating fingering patterns incessantly. Then I thought of the

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Imagine being able to sit down at your piano, place your hands on the keyboard, and just play! Many piano students think the ability to do this requires years of study. They couldn’t be more wrong!

Learning to play what you feel does not require extensive knowledge of harmony or theory. All that is required is the ability to do two things:

1. Believe that you know enough
2. Believe that you’re good enough

Thousands of classically trained pianists are able to play Rachmaninoff and Bach but are unable to express themselves poetically at the keyboard. Why? Because of the above 2 beliefs! It’s not enough to have mastered piano technique.

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So, you want to learn how to play piano. So do thousands of others around the world. Here’s how they usually go about it.

First, they try to find a piano teacher close to where they live. They may or may not know what style they want to learn, but figure the piano teacher can help them figure this out.

Next, it’s off to the piano teacher for the first appointment. What usually happens here is the teacher gives the student “an assessment” to see what they know. Now, for the most part, piano teachers won’t ask prospective students what they want to learn because they assume it will be classical in nature.

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Hawaiian Music has been developed over the years as a kind of melting pot of sounds from around the world. As such much of the Hawaiian Music that we associate with the islands is composed of a few basic native Hawaiian elements with other cultural influences woven into it.

Contemporary Hawaiian Music often contains one or several of the following; a Ukulele, a guitar, double-bass, steel guitar, slack-key guitar, falsetto or high pitched singing, chanting, and native instruments such as the Pahu or a shark-skin covered drum, and the hanu ihu or the nose flute. Many of the listed items came to Hawaii with Merchants and Missionaries, even the falsetto singing style was learned from missionaries who first

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Piano chord charts are used to help you keep track of chord changes. And the cool thing about them is that you can use them for improvisation and composition. Here’s how.

Let’s say you have an 8-bar phrase to play. There are no chord symbols yet so you don’t know what chords you’ll be playing. You just have 8-bars in front of you. The first thing you need to know is the time signature. For our purposes here, we’ll keep it simple and use 3/4 or 4/4 time.

Now let’s select 4/4 time for our 8-bar phrase. Now we know the meter but what about the chords? Here’s where we can jot down chord progressions for either improvisation or composition. For example,

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