Tag: Chicago Piano lessons

  • Why can’t we all get along?

    Let us be, for a moment, a fly on the wall and witness a typical rehearsal. Whether it’d be in rock, jazz, country or blue grass, doesn’t matter. We have a few instruments, a rock quartet, for example. Bass, Drums, Piano, guitar, and a few singers among those players. Good! Those people, to warm up, will…

  • Owning it.

    The modern world doesn’t have any patience for patience. It is also losing patience for repetition. But the job of the drummer is repetition. We take a pattern, any pattern, we repeat it exactly. That is, as a matter of fact, how you create a groove. Only that moto doesn’t fit the era we live…

  • Is classical music up for interpretations?

    A written classical music piece of music must be played exactly. That’s the premise. The composer worte the notes, you have to play them. All of them. And, you do not mess with the notes. What the composer has written, you play. Nothing less, nothing more. Right! I’ll take a famous work from Mozart: Sonata…

  • From the great ones

    I am thinking about Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach or Mozart. They made the effort to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. Bach, famously, wrote a whole book for his wife, some very simple pieces that every piano student has studied at a moment or another. Mozart also composed some short pieces. But his…

  • That old pad

    I remember when I first started, back when the dinosaurs were not yet created, I didn’t have a pad. I had a pair of sticks. That’s it. Sticks and nothing else. I traveled light. But everywhere I would go, I would be drumming. There was always a surface, flat or not so flat, to play…

  • Building a right foot

    As a drum teacher, I often get ask how to build a right foot, a bass drum foot. The subject is extremely important because the bass drum is one of the prominent voice of almost any rock/funk groove and requires a lot of dexterity. To play singles, the training is fairly simple: put the metronome…

  • Young pupils

    Young pupils should be taught music with games. And, the younger they are, the more playful the games. I was almost ready to write : “the younger they are, the silliest the game”. Yet, I am convinced that is the best way to learn, when we don’t think of a task as a chore, a…

  • Care

    Being the main care giver, I have always been very close to my children. It has been a lot of fun taking them to the zoo, the museums, the aquarium or teaching them how to bike, how to swim, how to be nice to each other and to themselves. And, of course, it has been…

  • With or without you

    This song is usually the last one we play on stage. We’ve done it with Louis’s drum solo since the beginning. Only now, he rips it something grand. I am so proud!

  • I want you to want me

    This was done back in the days. We loved playing that song. Although, here, my children are a little intimidated by the cameras, as you can probably tell.