To many people, the thought of playing music brings back bad childhood memories, akin to playing dodgeball and lunchtime detention. Most have reasons why they let music fall from their lives, and that's so sad, because music is a language and if you can...

Transposition is a musical term for moving notes higher or lower to change key. As an arranger, the question I'm asked the most is: "Why is the music in this key?" Though more often than not, questions are phrased as expletives, "Pachelbel wrote...

Piano rolls were paper tubes that made a player piano play a song. You would thread in one end of the paper roll -- kind of like an old film projector. As the paper fed through, little holes would tell the piano what notes...

Stupid tweets have ruined careers, relationships, political ambitions and Olympic dreams.

So, why do we do it?

I blame evolution. Technology has advanced so much faster than human social evolution and we are just not wired to deal with the immediacy...

Why do some people find playing a song very easy and others find it exceedingly difficult? I think it's because as we practice we are basically trying to crack the code of a piece. As an example, look at this magic eye picture. Some will see the image immediately, some...

Eavesdropping on a conversation and only catching the odd word is one of life's great frustrations. Asking people to speak up or moving your chair to join their table is not likely to be met with much enthusiasm.
So what's to...

My philosophy of learning to play a musical instrument is to create a "Learning Cycle." Simply put, the more you play, the more you enjoy and the better you get. The better you get, the more you enjoy, and the more you want to show off. The more you show...