One Handed Trios are a series of three-line short piano pieces I’ve used in my teaching over the years. I finally got around to officially publishing them – the first 5 are available on SheetMusicDirect and SheetMusicPlus.
They look a little odd when you first glance at them – three lines of music. So are they for a soloist? A duet? A trio? One piano? Two keyboards?
Well, all of the above. They can be played by 3 players – each takes on line. Or Two players – one take two lines, the other takes the remaining one {and you can decide which two lines the first player takes}.
A soloist trying to play these is going to have make some choices on HOW exactly to make that happen – they may actually have to leave something out. The question is, what? How do you decide what it musically least important?
This should foster some conversations about looking at the music and figuring out what is going on – the “college level music theory terminology” would be Musical Analysis.
If you enjoy it – or know of someone who might be interested in these pieces, please let them know!.
One of the Projects this year [the capital P was deliberate, by the way] is to work through a backlog of projects, including several pieces I have written or arranged over the years. The first-fruits of organizing the several terabytes of data scattered over several hard drives is that I have found several files I thought were lost – if not in reality, then in my head.
The first pieces posted are what I called “One Handed Trios”. These are intermediate level pieces with three lines of music, and can thus be played by three, two, or even one student [thought the one student would need to be advanced and do some very thoughtful practicing].
If you are interested, stash the links below, which are searches to find what I have posted:
There will be more coming in the future, ranging from a serious “classical” piece for piano, to charts from my albums, to…. well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
My wife was looking at Facebook, and started playing this lyric video. As it played I kept wondering why it sounded so familiar.
Turns out that was me doing the piano work on the tune – “It’s Your Life” by Tamara Wilson. My friend Joey Stuckey – who produced the tune and played guitar and bass on it – posted the thing on Facebook.
There is often a fair amount of time between when Joey throws a project my way and when I hear the final result. When that happens I’ve usually long forgotten that I’d played on the thing – too many OTHER things to remember. Usually I can dredge up the memory given enough rummaging around the back end of the cave known as my head.
I remember this one – Joey handed me the chart, the rough tracks, and said, “Play something”. It was fun – I tried to seriously accompany Tamara’s rough track, creating something that grew over time as the lyrics did. Miguel Castro added some very tasty drum work, and Joey’s guitar work is pretty nice as well [but don’t tell him I said that].
After much mucking about, I am finally working on a website revamp and straightening out my communication channels. Actually, that’s just a fancy way of saying I’m cleaning out the virtual sock drawer that my website had become – too many iterations, too much time had passed, too much content had been created, and not enough attention had been paid to the site for it to be THAT organized, or even useful.
Much material has been cleaned up as I type this – several sections have been combined into a “History” sub-section because there were some pretty cool things I didn’t want to lose, like articles on music technology, pictures from some Joe Stuckey Band performances, audio of some performances that weren’t QUITE good enough to release officially, but were still interesting… that type of stuff.
Once all the floors get swept up and the cupboards get organized I’ll be adding the link to the front of the website.
The broken links on the main parts of the site have also been fixed. Sheesh, a lot has changed in the last 3 years in the music distribution scene.
There will be major changes coming to the front, as you’d expect. But more details on that later.
The CHRISTmas albums were part of a Westman Reviews Holiday Gift guides. You can see the entire guide HERE. The entry specific to CHRISTmas is HERE.
If I do say so myself [and shouldn’t], the tracks have stood the test of time, as I hoped when creating them. They are still well worth multiple listenings.
I’m a member of Enlightened Piano Radio – a group of pianists who record some pretty good stuff. “It Should Be Called CHRISTmas” was named best Holiday Album in 2018 – so, yeah, I’m kinda partial to the group.
If you are on Spotify, and looking for some good piano music, check out the quarterly playlist: