Upstate Piano

01/10/2026

Added these to my cart (helpful for shredding meat in our low cooker)🙂. Message me if you want the link.

05/17/2025

Rehearsal #1 with soprano Angelique Cardella this morning for a recital coming after the summer. Exciting voice and musical partner!💜

05/30/2024

Do you need a crash course in reading rhythms?
Are you a church choir or musical theater singer who has never learned to read music?

Let me give you three one-hour lessons, and you might be amazed at what you will be able to do!

I am offering the first three weeks of June for crash-course lessons🎶. PM me!

05/09/2019

We’re in the way to making this marvelous lady a solid “Baptist pianist”, without even looking at notes on the staff😀. It’s part of my passion to teach chords and music theory and how they make up the fundamentals of things like church hymns.

03/27/2019

Waco Piano Lessons is moving to South Carolina! Sorry, but I won’t be taking new students. I’m happy to try to refer you to a teacher in the Waco area.

02/15/2019

...Ah! So many good pieces from which to choose for a student💜...

01/31/2019

😂😉.

Do you experience: Poor Performance? Anxiety? Fear of Child Prodigies? You may need TUPRACTIS! How you ever wonder how professionals get that extra "edge" to...

12/24/2018

Quality piano teaching-What is that, and how can you tell if a piano teacher is a good one?🤔🤔🤔

All piano teachers teach how to read music-notes, rhythms, fingerings.

But if the road ends there, you do not have quality teaching.

Quality teaching focuses on hand position and proper development of how to use the fingers.

Quality teaching focuses on the legato touch and development of a beautiful tone created from it.

Quality teaching pays attention to the music’s details-not just the dynamics (louds and softs) but also the articulation (connected notes and separated notes).

Quality teaching makes sure the melody is louder than the harmony, and that there is care to bring out the bass line.

Quality teaching focuses on phrasing, that there is a rise and fall to a musical “line”, like a singer’s line, with the last note tapering and played more softly, in general phrasing. There is beauty and care in phrasing a musical line.

Quality teaching instills the knowledge and habit of playing in all the keys their scales, chords and inversions, arpeggios, and octaves on a daily basis, to develop technique and prepare the student for easier sight reading.

Quality teaching drills rhythmic patterns and chord progressions and tracks such patterns in the student’s pieces.

There is a lot to quality piano teaching.

It is imparting an art that ultimately touches on matters of what is good and true and beautiful, and a quality piano teacher is excited to pass these things down to the next generation.

Of course, no amount of quality piano teaching will greatly develop a student who does not practice what he is taught diligently.

But a diligent student who does not get quality teaching will be crippled in his or her progress. Students lacking quality teaching have technique that will be underdeveloped and hinder them from being able to play beyond late intermediate or early advanced music. Or, if they have natural dexterity, the more advanced music they play will not be beautiful music-It will be lacking the advanced musicianship skills that go along with advanced playing as described above-beautiful tone, singing melody, sensitive phrasing, a sense of proper articulation for the particular style, no understanding of music theory.

There’s a lot to quality piano teaching.

It is a good thing to inquire in checking out potential teachers if they have any awareness, or understanding, or a strong conviction about how necessary the above aspects are in teaching their students.

A piano teacher may have dozens of students, but teachers not imparting all these skills will not have students older than about eighth grade, because the music is beyond their level technically to teach further. And the students will not “sound good” to the trained ear, nor will they satisfy the soul of the musical ear.

Music, above all, has the power to touch souls with its beauty, and a good piano teacher will develop all aspects of playing the piano to maximize that.

I want to recognize my Fargo, ND teacher Karen Okerlund, my Concordia College professor David Worth, and my MM/PS teachers Paul Schenly and Sergei Babayan.

11/16/2018

A story about chords...

After I mastered my 5-finger patterns early on in my piano lessons growing up under the teaching of Karen Okerlund, I had to learn chords and inversions. These three-the root chord, 1st inversion chord, and 2nd inversion, each have their own specific arrangement of intervals and specific fingerings, and different fingerings for each hand. After that, one learns the different arrangement of black and white keys for each key. This comes down to memorizing each note/interval/fingering one by one. Tedious, but it’s like learning the alphabet and then words to be able to read. Note by note, chord by chord, key by key, I just kept diligent working to master each of these in my practice times at home as they came up in each lesson. Once those were learned, it was learning the I-IV-V chord progression (-the staple pattern of 50s and also blues music).

Fast forward to yesterday-when I realized upon arriving to accompany musical theater repertoire that I had misplaced my music binder for it!- I played off the students’ sheet music. It worked fine, until one student only had his music with him...on his iPhone!

I laughed as I said I’d work with it as best as I could see it. I could read most of the tiny notes, and my ear knew the songs from our semester of practice. But where I couldn’t read, my training in hearing and playing all those root and inverted chords came into play. I just filled in with those what I heard or guessed to be the music.

Chords are the backbone of music and harmony, and music theory. Learn them, understand them, and you can improvise and fill in music anytime, anywhere.

11/01/2018

SCAAAAAAAALES!

Why scales, you ask? Play some Mozart or Beethoven, and you’ll soon see how integral these basic patterns are to classical music! The practice of scales and their incremental increase in speed makes your fingers work in dexterity and evenness. The renowned Moscow Conservatory of Music has a metronome standard of 160 for scales (playing sixteenths/beat). Of course, using the fingers correctly is part of playing scales well (and part of good teachiing).

Scales also make you review each key pattern, so you are immediately comfortable with whatever key you are playing in. This is especially crucial when sightreading!