Two True Stories

Here's a couple of very short true life stories.

Short Story One

I retired from "show biz" a long time ago. But I still like to play music, of course, and I like to play with other people, which sometimes results in playing out in public.

Last night my little band had one of our gigs at a local restaurant. This is a real specialty band. We play exclusively Brazilian tunes that were written like between 1920 and 1960. It's not samba, it's not bossa nova. It's a precursor to those styles. The style is called choro. Pretty obscure stuff.

The music is all written out, kind of like classical music, except with chords too. I prefer to memorize the music. I have more fun if I don't have to worry about following along in sheet music.

But the chord changes are really hard to learn. There are so many of them. But there is a tool I depend on for memorizing these songs. It makes things easy.

Short Story Two

Same location, the local restaurant, same time, same characters. Pam, my spouse, plays in this band too. Clarinet. She's good. In between our regular choro sets, we had a special guest join us o the band stand, Pam's father. He's going to be 92 on Monday, and he still plays guitar every day. We got Buck to join us for a few songs. He came up, 92 years old, plugged in his electric guitar, and wailed away.

Pam and I accompanied him, and one of the songs he chose to do was a song I had heard of, but had never played before. And I had no music. Yet I was able to play the chords as if I had the music right in front of me. There was a tool I used that enabled me to do that. Same tool.

What was the tool? It was the Circle of Fifths. The trick is in knowing how to use it. Anyway I couldn't wait to write out these stories, and send them to you.

Click below to find out more about this tool, and to order my special presentation for less than ten bucks, no strings attached.

http://pianofun.com/circle/promo_OF.html