Olivia's Piano Recital

My youngest started piano lessons last February and has been doing great. She loves it! Her first piano recital was June, 17th, in which she played "Sugarfoot Rag" as a duet with her teacher. About half way through the piece she lost her place and tried to pick up where she left off, but thankfully her teacher suggested they start over. She made it through the piece beautifully, took her bow to thunderous applause and Tammy and I were able to resume our breathing.

Here is a video of her performance. The MPEG is just over 15 meg, so you might not want to retrieve it using dial-up.

Fly

The Great Javelin Experiment is complete and we have a new song: Fly (click to download). This song started with Matt Butler recording some guitar and passing it on to me. I added bass and forwarded it to Jeff Thinschmidt who worked his magic by completely rearranging the song and adding a drum track. Dennis Haberkern added guitar, Matt added some synth guitar, Mel Scott added vocals with Jeff and Matt providing back-ups along with a female barbershop quartet doing harmony. Then, after many painstaking hours spent by Jeff mixing the song, we have the finish product.

This was really an interesting experiment in that, once each of us were done with our piece, we passed it on and didn't have any more input until the end, so each of us built on what the person before us provided. And all of this was done without any of us being in the same room at any given time. Pretty cool.

Van Howard

My youngest, Olivia, has always wanted to play drums. We convinced her that it would be better for her to take piano lessons first, as piano would give her a good all-around understanding of music.

Well, she's been playing piano for about 4 months now and is doing very well. We never have to remind her to practice and she really enjoys it. But she still would talk about how much she wanted to play the drums. This talk was fueled by the fact that a local music store where Lea takes guitar lessons had a used Pearl set for sale.

After some discussion, we told her we'd meet her 1/2 way on the purchase of the drum set. Little did we know she already had enough saved up to pay her portion. So now she is taking drum lessons in addition to piano lessons and our "music" room no longer has space for seating.