Getting the most from this great hobby!
This article is part of my guide to recording your piano at home. If you’re looking for a simple way to improve your piano recordings without getting into anything technical, a plug-in microphone is one of the easiest upgrades you can make. In this article, I’ll show you how the Shure MV88 works, why it...
"Record Your Piano: Shure MV88 a Great Smartphone Microphone"Continue reading
An old friend once said to me (quoting – or so he said – Henry Ford) that, if you’re doing well, you can afford to advertise, if you’re not doing well, you can’t afford not to. I’ve searched for this quotation and from what I can see it doesn’t actually exist – however, it’s not...
"First Facebook Advert for Tommy’s Piano Corner on YouTube"Continue reading
This article is part of my step by step guide on recording your piano at home. Any pianist knows that playing piano can be a lonely occupation – lots of hours work with often a limited audience for the output. However, in the new digital world, there are lots of ways to share with Family...
"How to film yourself playing Piano for Facebook or YouTube"Continue reading
This post is to go with my YouTube Video comparing Piano Practice to baking a Layer Cake and forms an essential aspect of my approach on how to practice piano effectively. I often want to tackle pieces that are way beyond my current technical level and I think it is ok for us to learn...
"Piano Practice: A Layer Cake Approach"Continue reading
This post is to go with my YouTube video Today I’d like to share a neat trick I found to help when trying to master a couple of tricky Waltzes on the piano. That trick is to play it in 4/4 time. You might think I’ve gone mad – a Waltz by definition is in...
"Piano Practice Idea: Waltzing in 4/4 time?"Continue reading
This post is to go with my YouTube video https://youtu.be/0Nz8ibdQUOI. Ever struggled to decide how fast (or slow) to play something – especially when there’s no metronome marking on the score? This is the case with most classical music and, in fact, you’d have to think about how useful they might really be in reality...
"Piano Practice: Choosing the ideal tempo – no metronome required"Continue reading
I first came across this book in the pages of Pianist Magazine (of which I’m a subscriber). The author, Alan Rusbridger, relates his story of tackling Chopin’s 1st Ballade in a year culminating in performing it to an audience. I bought the Kindle Edition from Amazon and read it during a Christmas Holiday in Bali. ...
"Review: Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible"Continue reading
When interpreting a piece of music, there are a number of ways to add interest to it and one of these is something I’ve noticed lots of professional pianists use – I call it Inner Voices. That is to say things that seem to be written as part of the harmony or the bass which...
"Add colour to your Piano playing with Inner Voices"Continue reading
This piece appeared in Pianist Magazine Issue 94. More popularly recognized as a cello solo (with piano accompaniment) famed as the music to the ‘Dying Swan’, this arrangement by Silotti is beautiful by its elegance and simplicity. Here, I’m using the term simplicity in its relative sense. If you take transcriptions by composers such as...
"Learning The Swan for Solo Piano, arranged by Siloti"Continue reading
I went Scuba Diving this weekend … very relaxing and prompted me to write this post based on a theory I developed a little while ago. As I’ve said before, I developed terrible problems with tension in my playing once I reached Grade 8. This probably caused me to abandon the piano in my early...
"Is there a similarity between playing the Piano and Scuba Diving?"Continue reading
