Michelle R claudiadm73   Just circling back with the info for Molly Gebrian's workshop on memorization techniques. Here's the link! Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 2 pm ET
“Learn Faster, Perform Better” – A Neuroscience-Informed Approach for Singers & Pianists to Memorizing with Dr. Molly Gebrian -  
Time: Jun 10, 2026 02:00 PM Eastern Time 
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84181927436
Meeting ID: 841 8192 7436
Violist, educator, and researcher, Dr. Molly Gebrian presents a practical and engaging online workshop on memorization for singers and pianists. Drawing on current research in cognitive science and music performance, this session offers useful strategies for more efficient memorization, deeper retention, and increased confidence in performance.

Blair Boone-Migura Thank you very much my dear👍😄! You are very kind 💕.

Peter Golemme Wow, wonderful playing!

I have to ask, how did you do this video recording? Do you have some automatic setup that switches between viewpoints? 
 

Is this your teaching studio?

Larry K hi Larry, thank you I'm glad to hear you liked this recording . 

I'm strictly a novice with the video recordings but the App I'm using makes it easy to look accomplished (if only it could do the same thing for my playing!).  The App is called Luma Fusion and it works on an iPad. It was ridiculously cheap for what it does, something like $30 and maybe another $20 or so for the "MultiCam" option.

MultiCam allows you to synchronize up to 6 different camera angles plus a master audio track.  

So what I do is commandeer every device in the house that is capable of recording an mp4 video file, and perch them at different spots around the piano.  The devices include an iPhone, an iPad, an old iPad, 2 cheap webcams, laptops, and an mp3 player that also happens to record video. I got blueToopth switches for all of the devices that suppot it, so that I can turn them on and off right from the piano bench.  I record the Audio onto a Zoom Live-trak 8, a nice little recorder that can record high quality audio (48 kHz at 24 bits).  Then I import the files into LumaFusion and synchronize them, which the App makes surprisingly easy. The App then allows you to select any one of the 6 camera angles at any time on the clip.  

The Transitions between the camera angles are all pre-packaged transitions that come with the app.  You simply tap on one (e.g. "Cross-Dissolve") and drag it down to the Timeline at the break point between 2 clips, and it blends them together  in seamless transitions that make me look like a pro video editor. .

I'll upload a photo in a couple of days of the space with the devices all set up.  The space is our living room, which my saintly wife tolerates my stringing all kinds of microphones and recording equipment all over when I'm working on a recording. 

I'm not a piano teacher, I'm a (semi)retired tax lawyer and, as my bio says, an 'unfrozen barrom piano player', but I do teach some younger family members, and have thought about working with classically trained players who want to learn more about playing by ear and improvising.   But I haven't done much about it yet.  Got to get fully retired first, which I'm working on.  

any other Q's let me know.

Peter Golemme Ha, wow, thanks for that explanation! Incredible.

Software is one of the most amazing inventions of the modern era, and I say that as someone who wrote code for forty years.

What is an “unfrozen barroom piano player”? I am drawing a blank.

Someone on Twitter remarked that Billy Joel’s character in Piano Man is playing in a gay bar, and doesn’t know it, because of that stuff about “Davy in the Navy” and the guy who “didn’t have time for a wife.” Hahaha.

Anyway, I can’t imagine marshaling this much technology to record my poor playing but I am glad it works for you.

I have thought of recording my Disklavier playing back my pieces, without me at the bench, and calling them my “ghost pieces.”

The Disklavier, a modern player piano that records and plays back acoustically, is great for party tricks. I’ll record some of my practice, play it back, and wander into the kitchen to talk to my wife, lol.

It can also be used to trick the neighbors into thinking that two pianists live in the house, one who plays like Dominic Cheli, who recorded for the Disklavier, and one who is mediocre and, frankly, disappointing.

As for retirement, good luck. I spent a year telling my wife I was retired before she started to believe it. I thought I was going to have to feign deafness.

I will say that, in my retirement, I enjoy reading literary fiction, messing around on the piano, and playing the recorder, which I have just started. I’m playing soprano, alto, tenor, and bass recorders with the guidance of a teacher. We play duets together. It is great fun.

Larry K 

Hi Larry,

The term “unfrozen Bar room Piano player“ is a reference to the old Saturday Night Live skits involving the “unfrozen caveman lawyer“. He was a caveman who was cryonically preserved in an iceberg and thawed out in the 20th century. He became a lawyer, and all his legal arguments were based on his intrinsic wisdom(?) acquired during his prior life as a caveman, unfettered by modern conventions and ways of thinking. Before every argument to the jury, he would always open with “I’m only an unfrozen caveman lawyer, but…“ to signify that he may be clueless about how the world works today, but here’s how he sees it.

People reading my posts, should assume that a similar phrase implicitly prefaces every single one of my comments. . 

They don’t make the kind of places anymore where I used to play for a living, but I still play pretty much the same way (not withstanding that I’m always trying to learn new things), so in that sense I’m an unfrozen, barroom piano player, not familiar with the modern world of the Piano and Conservatories, and Tone base is opening up all kinds of wide New vistas for me

With due Respect, I think your Twitter commentator is  wrong about the song “Piano man“.. I recognize every single one of those archetypal characters profiled in the song, and the common factor is not whether they were gay or straight, but rather that they were all  there drinking, perhaps a little too much, instead of doing what they would have rather have done with their lives. You would hear that kind of talk and all kinds of other talk  in a piano bar, precisely because people could hear themselves talk, as opposed to venues featuring a live band, where people would have to shout at each other just to carry on the most primitive  of conversations. 

I played in a number of gay bars in those years, usually as an accompanist for a singer or for an impersonator. The Vibe in such places was usually very different from the typical “straight” city bar.. Gay culture  was still not very well accepted by the mainstream in the 1970s, and was often hidden away in windowless venues without a lot of external indicators that there was a bar inside.. In the gay bars where I worked, there was an often tangible sense of joy, relief, and ebullience in the air,  as people felt they could safely be themselves amidst like-minded people.

These are all generalizations, of course, but, as with the clichéd characters in “Piano man“, there is a recognizable element of reality that these generalizations are based on.  

Peter Golemme Oh, yeah, the guy on Twitter is wrong about the characters in that song. I looked it up. All of the characters are based on real people that Billy Joel knew at a club in LA.

Wikipedia goes into detail about it. I can’t seem to copy the link.

I just appreciated the comedic value of the tweet, which is pretty much what appeals to me when I am on Twitter. It will never be X to me.

I was around in the 1990s and should have remembered that SNL skit but it has slipped my mind.

It’s cool that you managed to make a living playing the piano. That’s not an easy thing to do. 
 

For a while, I was playing the bass. I hung out on a bass forum and was happily surprised to see that bass players had gigs and made money.

Blair Boone-Migura Thank you so much for sharing this workshop with us here. I attended it while prepping for lessons and it was excellent! I believe it was mentioned that a recording of the discussion would be made available. If so, I would love a chance to review and reference some of Dr. Gebrian's points for an upcoming workshop of my own with some local teachers. 

Thanks again!

Blair Boone-Migura Thanks so much! 

Dustin Anderson Of course! My pleasure. I will do my best to have it posted this week, and will circle back here to drop it in the comments.