MUSICAL CONFIDENCE – how to discover yours

Confidence is the most important asset you can have when doing music (maybe when doing anything). The key to musical confidence is to find genuine, honest self-expression. This takes courage and compassion!

Blissful dreamy jazzy piano over minimal electronic beats

In this piano piece, I improvise sweet, warm, delicious jazzy harmonies with lyrical flourishes to create impressionistic, soulful music that floats over a sparse mid tempo hip-hop style beat to create feelings of equanimity and balance.

Pianoteq’s new Shigeru Kawai – so beautiful

If you connect fully with this instrument, it yields such remarkably balanced resonance, such delicious sonority. It’s almost like a feather bed, except it can deliver heavier, harder sounds effortlessly too. In this improv, I focus on the low mid range which is so warm, sweet, thick, balanced.

Sparse music with flow and poetry

In this piece, “Darkest Before Dawn”, I use the poetic structure of the rhythmic matrix or groove to generate a powerful feeling of poetic flow and deep, melancholy feeling. It’s easy to play the notes, as there are so few of them, but the poetry needs disciplined focus as you let go to feel the waves of flowing energy. The sheet music is available here.

How to play with great rhythm – 7 important keys

How to practise to make your playing rhythmically flowing and stable can be quite a conundrum. People often struggle to feel confident that they’re playing the correct rhythm and they tend to worry about going out of time. Often they resort to practising with a metronome and try to be perfectly in time but this just leads to more problems, tension and stiff unmusical playing. In this short video, I explain how to approach improving your rhythm and developing a strong sense of musical pulse and metre. Put these 7 keys to good rhythm into practice and you’ll find that playing with great rhythm can be easy and natural.

How to use an audible groove to sense the music’s structure

When music has some kind of accompanying figuration that shows the underlying groove, that can be a very helpful way to feel the rhythmic structure of the music as it unfolds. But you still need to consciously generate a strong matrix structure and know where you are within it at every moment, so that the music makes perfect sense – like a poem.