A project to record and share my piano practices on the Internet, in a musical journal format. Hopefully if you are trying to learn jazz piano this page will give you some ideas.

About

Playing the piano is a serious (and enjoyable!) interest of mine. I am an avid student of jazz piano with many years of classical training. I play in several bands (including a jazz trio which performs at weddings and in restaurants, a folk contradance band, and previously as accompanist for a choir). I am taking private lessons from a local professional jazz player. I should be practicing more than I am now. 

Here is my idea - I will record all (or most) of my practice sessions on my digital keyboard in MIDI format. I will then publish them on my web site.

I'm hoping that this will encourage me to practice more. Although the effect on how I practice will be interesting to observe. I will try my best to ignore the fact that I am recording the practices. I am basically giving up my artistic privacy, like a painter who publishes all his/her sketchbooks.  Through this process, I will be creating a journal of my musical exploration. However, I am also opening up all my raw composing ideas for anyone who cares to listen. If you're interested in ideas for how to practice piano, especially jazz piano practice, this page might be useful to you.

This page might be interest to someone learning to play piano, or it might not. Remember that I have been playing piano since I was five years old. I am in my mid twenties now. What I think would be really neat is if owners of Yamaha Disklavier pianos started downloading my practice files and playing them on their real acoustic pianos. However, as I will mention below, my practices are not always pleasant on the ears!

Credits

Some thank-you's are in order. I want to thank all of the wonderful teachers and musicians who have helped show me the joy of music. One of the best things they have taught me is how to learn music for myself.  I apologize if I forgot to mention someone here, because you are all special to me.

Ms. Cindy Richet - Cloverdale BC (piano teacher)
Mrs. Nancy Shelly - Delta BC (piano teacher)
Mrs. Yvette Rowledge - Surrey BC (piano teacher)
Mrs. Carol Peters - Delta BC (mom, and piano teacher)
Mr. Neil Peters - Delta BC (dad, and jazz saxophone player)
Mr. Byron Peters - Vancouver BC (talented brother, and the next big jazz drummer to hit the scene in the next 5 years!!)
The late Ms. Beverly Louie - Vancouver BC (very special person/visual artist and piano teacher). This web site is dedicated in her memory.
Ms. Jill Sparrow - Delta BC (inspiring music teacher, Seaquam Secondary School)
Mrs. Joan Hansen - Victoria BC (cousin, renowned contemporary composer and artist)
Mr. Chris Sigerson - Vancouver BC (jazz piano teacher and top-call local artist)
Mr. Zoli Filotas - Montreal, Quebec (friend, jazz drummer)
Mr. Colin Defreitas - Coquitlam BC (friend, jazz musician)
Mr. Mark White - Burnaby BC (friend, jazz musician)
Mr. Chris Denis - Burnaby BC (friend, amazing Cuban percussionist, composer, guitarist and upcoming recording engineer)
Mr. Boris Reitman - New York City, NY (friend, jazz musician)
Ms. Robyn Stuart - Richmond BC (friend, jazz vocalist)
Mr. Kevin Shan - Vancouver Saxophonist Arranger / Composer / Teacher
Ms. Krista Wallace - Vancouver Vocalist extraordinaire
Ms. Angela Nielsen - Vancouver, BC - Amazingly talented vocalist, writer and actor who you will be hearing more about soon, believe me!
Mr. Jimi Cuell - Vancouver BC - Very gifted drummer, composer, film producer and creative genius who I have the honor of working with.
Mr. Kalvin Olafson - Vancouver BC - Actor, guitarist, and upcoming celebrity who I am lucky to consider a friend.
Mr. Hemme Luttjeboer - Port Coquitlam BC (brilliant professional transcriber who works for Warner Brothers... and sometimes he sends me some of his incredible arrangements...)
Mr. Bill Aubert - Vancouver BC (friend, jazz bassist)
Dr. John Thompson - Port Coquitlam BC (choir director)
All the members of the F.A.T. Jazz ensemble.
All the members of the Sybaritic String Band.
All the past/present members of the SFU Choir.
Yamaha for creating such great acoustic and electronic pianos.
Everyone else around me, for allowing me to pursue my passion in music!

And I also want to thank everyone from around the world who gives me feedback on these recordings and this project! I appreciate it!

Disclaimer

Perhaps if you've never studied music you don't realize the huge difference between practice and performance. If you've come to hear samples of my piano to judge what I sound like when I perform, I suggest you listen to my Jazz Trio Mp3 Demos instead. Practicing is partly about exploring new ideas, taking risks, and going off on tangents. It's also about drilling stuff into your brain and repeating things until they sound good. Another important part of practicing is technique. Technique (scales, chords, and exercises) sounds quite boring to listen to. Practicing is also about making lots of mistakes and fixing them. This process is sometimes painful and takes a long time. In performance, a goal is to play a variety of techniques to create an interesting harmonic and melodic flow. However, in practice, I often focus on a single technique for a long time, to help improve my skill at that technique. This means that the practice often becomes very boring and even unbearable to listen to. However, there are a few moments throughout each practice where I hit on something kind of neat. I guess that by listening to them later I might be able to bring back some sort of inspiration.

My current style of practicing is not very disciplined (as you will find out). I try to enjoy myself (at least a little!) during a practice, and try out new things. That's a big difference from how I used to practice when I was studying classical pieces, which involved repeating a few bars of a piece over and over until I got it perfect.

I've also provided lead sheets for some of my original compositions.

The Recordings

I've recorded the practices in Midi format. The quality of the recording will vary depending on what kind of synthesizer your computer is using. I recommend you download Winamp music player. 

A Note to Yamaha Disklavier and Pianodisc Piano Owners

I'm offering many hours of my jazz piano practicing to you, free, whatever that is worth anyways! All my practices are free to download and play on your piano at home. If you have a Yamaha Disklavier or Pianodisk piano, copy these files to a disk and pop it into your piano's disk drive. Or you can hook the piano up to your computer and use MIDI software such as Cakewalk to play the midi files through that.

Some older Disklavier or Pianodisc models can only play MIDI files which are of Midi Format "1". I've marked the files which are encoded with Midi Format 1 with the symbol [1] which immediately follows the filename (on most of the most recent practices at the bottom of the page).

If you are having trouble playing these files on your Disklavier or Pianodisk piano, please send me an email at gpeters@sfu.ca and I would be more than happy to help. 

How to Play these Files without a Disklavier or Pianodisc

You can play them on any computer which has a MIDI Synthesizer. However, the quality of the playback will depend on how good your synthesizer is. The synthesizer that comes on most Windows and Macintosh computers is good enough to get the idea, but it may just sound bad because of the quality of the synthesizer. If you're using a PC, I suggest using Winamp to play the files, because it comes with its own Software Midi Synthesizer which does a pretty nice job of playing these free MIDI files to download.

Also, if you're a jazz student who is using these files to fool your parents into thinking you are practicing, I would love to hear from you (and yes, I won't give your secret away!).

Files sound best with Winamp music player.