GrooveWindow

Uwe Karcher offers a great blues transcription

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 03:11:05 +0000

A lovely gift showed up in my inbox today: Uwe Karcher, a German pianist and piano teacher has transcribed the final solo from 30 Must-have Blues Licks and added in his own left-hand parts. The transcription is top-notch, and the left hand parts are a great way to make this into a complete piece.

Many people have asked for some kind of left-hand part to go with these blues and thanks to Uwe — now it’s here! Just head over to the dedicated blues page, scroll down near the bottom and download Uwe’s PDF!

Groove Starter #1 Available

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:58:01 +0000

Many people have suggested that they would appreciate some tutorials that were a little easier than the advanced funk grooves. So this is the first of many in a new set of tutorials called “Groove Starters.”

This one is called “Open Fifths” and highlights both that chord and the fifth interval. If you learn this piece, you’ll be able to play a fifth anywhere on the piano at the drop of a hat! We’ll also discuss some of the music theory behind the slightly-dissonant hanging chords which give this tune its ambient feel.

Head over to the dedicated Groove Starter #1 page for all of the videos, a free PDF with the sheet music, and several MIDI files for loading into Synthesia or your favorite sequencer.

Click the thumbnail below to watch the first video, and to hear the whole tune at full speed.

A Beautiful Version of Lullaby #4 from neimaD11

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 05:11:12 +0000

neimaD11 from YouTube submits an absolutely gorgeous recording of my “Lullaby #4″ from 2008. I don’t think I could have played this better myself. Bravo!

Improv: C-Jam Blues & Chameleon

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:56:26 +0000

I was excited to wrap up shooting for the upcoming tutorial series, “Groove Starter #1″ and in celebration I recorded a quick little jazz/funk improv including snippets of the classic Ellington tune, “C-Jam Blues” and a bit of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” along with a bunch of random piano wankery.

Enjoy!

Harry Sharp Kills Funk Groove #4

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:34:27 +0000

MAN! Long-time friend and reader, Harry Sharp puts in this killer performance of Funk Groove #4. Nothing half-way here: He plays the whole tune from start to finish, and nails the whole thing. Thanks, Harry! Sounding great!

Music from the Bermuda Triangle

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 01:54:20 +0000

I’ve always held the view that it’s better to post only when there is something significant to talk about. As my tutorial videos tend to take a long time to produce, this means that my posting frequency is awfully low.

However, I tend to produce a bunch of music that isn’t tutorials — little experiments and improvs for fun or profit. Well, fun, anyways. These are spread out on various places online without any way to know where they are, so I’m going to start gathering them back up here in some upcoming posts.

I’m also hard at work on two new sets of tutorial videos. First is “Groove Starter #1: Open Fifths,” an interesting little tune that’s much easier to play than my advanced funk grooves. The music and arrangement is complete, so shooting the video is next. Second, I’m working the full tutorial for “Funk Groove #3 in F” with an all-new, never-heard-before bridge. I’ve got to do some clean up on the music, but the arrangement is done, so it’s also ready to shoot.

There was a time when I didn’t have the space to have any keyboards or pianos out. I was forced to do music completely with the computer, so I did a bunch of electronic stuff. This may or may not be your thing, but I’m still a big fan of the electronic genre (I’m mostly into Drum-n-Bass these days). Here’s a thumpy little tune I did back in 2006. Remember, if you head over to this track’s page on SoundCloud, you can comment on specific points of the music and download the whole thing for free.

2006-03-08 Throbbing Drum by groovewindow

Sheet Music and MIDI file for Christmas Time is Here

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:21:06 +0000

Things are always busy for me this time of year with the holidays and the fact that two of my three children have birthdays in December. However, due to many requests, I’ve managed to throw together a transcription of my arrangement of the Vince Guaraldi classic, “Christmas Time is Here” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” I’ve also got a MIDI file for those of you that like Synthesia or other MIDI-based tools for learning new music. The MIDI file is auto-generated from my notation software, so it’s not a particularly “musical” performance!

Christmas Time is Here (Sheet Music as PDF)

Christmas Time is Here (MIDI File)

You may wish to right-click and choose “Save As…” to download these to your computer.

If you haven’t heard the tune, click the thumbnail below for my old 2008 recording of it on my old YouTube channel. Happy Holidays to you all!

Videos now available in iTunes

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:41:19 +0000

Its still a work in progress, but if you have an iPod, iPhone, iPad, or iSomethingElse, you should be able to subscribe to my videos using iTunes, and put them on your mobile device. This might make practicing at the old piano a bit easier!

I haven’t actually tested this (I don’t have one of these iNfamous iDevices), so give it a try and let me know if it works!

Just click the new link over on the right side… the one that says Videos in iTunes.

Funk Groove #4 [CryBaby Mix]

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 20:43:34 +0000

After finally wrapping up the videos for Piano Funk Groove #4, I decided to have a little fun and put together an alternate version of the tune along with a video. I even broke out my 1985 Roland AXIS Keytar, and it’s pal the Akai MX-73 (also from 1985). I had a lot of fun shooting this against my homemade greenscreen and editing the video. I used open source software for nearly everything:

Avisynth: For green screen keying, deinterlacing and colorizing video
Blender: (Sequence Editor) for actually editing the video timeline and layout out the multi-frame cuts
Gimp and Inkscape: for straight graphics and title cards
VIM: My new favorite text file for editing all of those avisynth scripts.

I also took a moment to clean up the page where all of these videos live, and added a nice little popup video viewer to help save some space.

This also means it’s time for me to get back to work on the next tutorials!

Click the thumbnail below for a popup video — I hope you enjoy it!

Facebook Page Video Sharing Fun

jonathon@groovewindow.com (Jonathon Wilson) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:29:29 +0000

Talk about organic!

You may or may not know that there is a GrooveWindow Facebook page. It started out as a simple — and fairly infrequent — place where I could drop little quick news updates that weren’t quite worthy of a full blog post. A number of people have joined the page, and we’ve been having some good conversations there.

Then, along came Schmurze, who reminded me of an excellent video on youtube with a killer funk groove — not to mention shredding hammond player:

I posted this to the facebook page, and people really liked it, and starting looking for more videos of great music.

Since then, the page has become a fun place for everyone to post great links to piano players (and otherwise great musicians) that they’ve enjoyed. It’s been a great way to learn about new musicians that we may not have heard of. For example, I had never heard of the insane Hiromi Uehara until James Strong posted one of her videos:

So… come join in the fun! If you’re on Facebook, come on over to the GrooveWindow page, and post some links of musicians you really enjoy!