Tag: piano

SubscribeStar Saturday: Tales of a Hedge Pianist: Playing Piano at the Presbyterian Church

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Last summer I served as the fill-in pianist for the local United Methodist Church in what became our new town. You can read about that here. Two Sundays ago I was invited to play for the local Presbyterian Church for their annual camp service.

What is a “hedge pianist”? Essentially, it’s a term I’ve coined for a freelance/unaffiliated pianist-for-hire. The “hedge” comes from the concept of a “hedge knight“; the hedge knight is a landless, traveling knight who takes work where he can, hoping his skills will land him in the retinue of some great lord, with all the benefits that come with it. With just his horse, armor, and arms, the hedge knight seeks to prove his skill in tournaments and small conflicts.

Similarly, a “hedge pianist” is a masterless pianist traveling about, taking gigs where they come, with a possible interest in gaining enough renown to land a cushy weekly church gig, or playing Friday nights at an upscale eatery. It’s also just a nerdy (or cool?) way of making playing as a fill-in pianist at local churches sound like I’m some kind of musical ronin roaming about the countryside looking for a piano to play.

Regardless, I had the opportunity to play that role two Sundays back for the local Presbyterian Church. The church has a “camp” service every year in preparation for their Vacation Bible School, and the pastor asked if I could play some hymns and all the usual pieces for High Church Protestant services, namely “Doxology” and the “Gloria Patri.” Naturally, I agreed.

The Chapel
A Gazebo with a Bent Cross
The Campground and Buildings

The service was held at a campsite owned and maintained by the Southern Baptist church that Dr. Wife and I attend. It’s a beautiful little spot about twenty minutes outside of town, tucked away among the pine trees. The grounds and buildings are very well-maintained. I had some trepidation that the service would take place outdoors, which would present two inconveniences: the intense South Carolina summer heat, and the wind blowing my music everywhere.

Fortunately, the camp has a commodious (and air-conditioned) chapel, where a responsive Yamaha digital piano waited for me. There was also a delectable fried chicken lunch on the other side of the service.

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Phone it in Friday CXXIV: YouTube Roundup CLXXXV: Hornpiping on a Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Just a reminder that everything is still 90% off with promo code moving at my Bandcamp page.

While packing up for the big move I found quite a few fun little items and mementos:  old notebooks from my childhood; photographs with friends in our doughy youths; doodles from former students who now likely have families of their own; bits of music I’d composed.  One of the coolest finds was my old Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50:

This little keyboard has been in my family for as long as I can remember.  I’m certain it was my older brother‘s keyboard, but through years of use it became “mine” in that way that childhood items do among siblings.  The keyboard is likely just a few years younger than me, which would mean it’s been around for nearly four decades.

And it still works—well, mostly.  The keys from the first F through the first D no longer play, but every key from Eb up to that third C work beautifully.  It runs on six AA batteries, which I apparently changed out recently, because I was jamming on this little puppy before packing it.

In my early, lo-fi-because-I-didn’t-know-any-better days, I recorded quite a few pieces with this PSS-50 plugged into my brother’s Crate guitar amp with an old computer microphone dangling in front of the amp’s horn (I’m going to release those recordings one day).  In the super early days, I’d record separate WAV files using Sound Recorder, then combine them using the same software, hoping everything lined up properly; Adobe Audition 1.5 smoothed that over for me, though.

I still remember some of the classic voices on this keyboard:  “26” cues up an “Electric Guitar” sound which has this amazing distortion to it while still sounding clean enough to use melodically.  The default “00” is a “Trumpet” that, to me, is the standard sound any synthesizer should have.  Indeed, there is a more robust Yamaha synth from this era that someone donated to the school years ago, and “Brass 1” is the default voice when starting the keyboard.

That yellow “Demo” button played an instrumental version of the song “Venus.”  My older brother changed the lyrics to “Booty, Booty, Booty, Come Home,” which he said was the theme song for my band, which he initially named “Booty and the Bootettes” before changing it to “Booty and the Flaming Booties.”

As you can see, dear reader, this keyboard and I share a lot of history together.  If it ever stops playing entirely, I’m going to have to write to Yamaha to repair it.  They’ll probably have to bring their last remaining 1980s consumer mini-keyboard specialist out of retirement/cryogenic freezing to do so, but I want this little guy handed down to (God Willing) my little guys!

So it was that I picked ol’ PSS-50 up and improvised a little hornpipe using “17”—“Reed Organ”:

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Lazy Sunday CCCXLXIV: Fire and Water

The Portly Politico12 Comments

It’s a quick Lazy Sunday this week as Dr. Wife and I hunker down in the cold.  I’m casting my gaze back to two posts from earlier this week, one based in the coolness of the watery depths, the other in the fiery crucible of the modern restaurant industry:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

New Music Tuesday II: “Koi Dance”

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I’ve been working hard on this week’s piece, “Koi Dance,” for about two weeks now.  It’s a chamber piece featuring two flutes, bassoon, and piano, and draws inspiration from Bedřich Smetana’s “The Moldau”; that piece also features a flowing theme that depicts the movement of water.

I plugged the finished piece into Audacity and applied some additional reverb and a master effect, both of which I think have allowed the sound to “pop.”

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New Music Tuesday I: “Herald”

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Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Now that it’s 2026, it’s time to make a few changes to the blog.  One of those overdue changes comes to the long-running weekly feature Open Mic Adventures.

According to a hasty review of my records, I ceased playing open mics—and, indeed, most live gigs outside of private bookings—in 2025.  I simply lacked the time and energy—and interest.  I much prefer rehearsing my students so they can play live.

That’s been one of the big changes in my life in recent years.  I enjoy playing live, but as I get older, going to open mic nights and playing songs I wrote a decade (or more) ago lost its luster.  It’s also amazing how once I got engaged (and now married), my desire to show off in coffee shops plummeted.  If I’m going to play to impress anyone—always a dubious proposition—it’s going to be for Dr. Wife.

That’s all to say that I’m not ending Open Mic Adventures, per se—there’s always that chance I’ll get that itch to play and get some good video in the process—but that I’m shifting it into something more accurate:  New Music Tuesday.  The “Open Mic” appellation ceased to be accurate for most of 2025, as I featured more and more of my original electronic compositions.

Of course, good ol’ WordPress.com makes it easy to put together these weekly, multimedia posts.  One thing I’ve come to love about WordPress.com is how intuitive it is to upload all sorts of media.

For example, here is today’s featured track, “Herald,” uploaded as a beautifully lossless WAV file using the “Audio” block:

I found this brief piece scribbled on a red tardy slip I had in my desk. I apparently wrote it down on 8 August 2023, and finally put it into my music composition software this morning.  It’s a very simple, quick piece, indicative of the kinds of etudes I was composing at that time.  As such, “Herald” is a brief piano fanfare, suitable for players at most levels.

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Open Mic Adventures CLIX: “Dido’s Lament”

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Years ago, my dear mom found a copy of The Usborne Book of Piano Classics (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you) at a book sale and picked it up for me.  I have used that book countless times over the years for gigs, piano lessons, practice, arranging, etc.  My High School and Middle School Music Ensembles have performed arrangements based on those in the book many times at the annual South Carolina Independent School Association Music Festival.

While it consists of piano arrangements of famous pieces from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, I often play the pieces on saxophone.  I found myself pulling the book out in preparation for a gig this past Sunday (a wedding proposal—the client’s girlfriend said yes!), and came upon a melancholy piece from the Baroque composer Henry Purcell, “When I am laid in earth,” perhaps better known as “Dido’s Lament.”  It’s from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.

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