20 Nov

The Mahoney House retirement community in York, Nebraska is a bit more musical around lunchtime thanks to the efforts of 93-year-old veteran Art Frederickson. For the past decade, almost every day, Art has played fun and familiar tunes on his electronic piano for the facility’s...

13 Jun
Just like the human body, the anatomy of an acoustic piano is quite fascinating! There are many different moving “body parts” and “limbs”  that must work together perfectly to make the oh so wonderful noise that we call piano music. In this blog post, I wanted to continue the theme of learning more about the piano itself, and dissect an acoustic piano.
08 May
In a previous blog post, I talked about 5 incredible ways playing the piano helps strengthen your mind (you can find that post by CLICKING HERE).  In this post, I want to let you in on four awesome ways the piano also helps keep your body happy and healthy - the piano truly is a miracle instrument huh?
03 May
In a recent video, I covered how to figure out what key would be the right one to sing a tune in. You can find that video at the link below: CLICK HERE TO SEE VIDEO In the video above, I take the inverse and say, what if a singer comes up to you and starts singing a tune in some key, and as a piano player, they want you to start playing along with them?
26 Mar
Just a quick note concerning a lot of people who don’t play at all sharing with me that they have such a dream to be able to sit down and have some fun playing the piano, yet it seems SO insurmountable a task to take on. A different, yet similar, version of that comment comes from folks who do in fact play piano at some level, but have strictly played using a traditional classical approach requiring them to play only what they can read from the printed sheet. In both cases the path from where they are now to where they imagine the ability to play either from a lead sheet, or from no sheet music at all, seems not long, but totally non-existent! To have the creative ability to kind of create an arrangement of some song on the fly and “from within” just seems like a total mental block.
11 Aug

Continuing on this “back to the basics” theme working through different chord types, Scott “The Piano Guy” Houston shows you the formula for building 7th chords on a piano in any key. ...

17 Jan

In my never-ending quest to keep you loaded up with ways to embellish things with your piano playing, I have an ending that you can use with any tune that is NOT a ballad. It is a good barn burner ending Pros use a lot....

22 Dec

Hey, I had someone ask me the other day about how I was playing  a turnaround chord progression at the end of a blues song I was playing. It is a way to finish up the end of the blues and go back up to...

06 Nov

Don’t Let the Tail Wag the Dog in Your Quest to Play Piano. In my years of giving live workshops and hearing from thousands of viewers of my television programs, one constant fallacy has remained prevalent among what I affectionately call “wannabe” recreational piano players. That fallacy...