I have early memories of my brother getting all fussed over for putting on a little penguin looking tuxedo and playing at a piano recital. In not too long of a time it was starting to happen to me as well. As soon as I knew my ABC's and my hands grew. That was supposed to be some kind of big deal, "Oh, he doesn't have his brother's hands." Well, I would hope not, one set of hands is enough for me. To go on, they had me reading music before I could read writing. As I got older I came to realize music was big on my mother's side of the family, dad's family was tone deaf. By the time our piano teacher died my brother had 9 years of classical piano training and I had 7. My mother's youngest brother, uncle Tom, who was a freshman at Youngstown State University said, "I'm starting a new band and you're going to play bass," quite matter of factly. LET THE TRANSFER OF KNOWLEDGE BEGIN.....You know, to a kid, you are most impressed that while playing music you could hang with the older guys! I just learned to play acoustic guitar and bass at the same time. Anyway, I started professionally at that time. I was 11.

To help understand transfering knowledge from keys to guitar you will still need to know Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do for chord building and scales. You must know the notes for each string when struck open. They are E, A, D, G, B, E from low (pitch) to high. Remember from the piano that a 1st, 3rd, and a 5th is a 3 note chord called a triad. If you look at a C chord on a guitar chord chart you'll see the 3rd fret pressed on the A string which makes a C note, the 2nd fret pressed on the D string making an E note, and the 1st fret pressed on the B string making it a C note. (Get enough tunes and sit on the sidewalk in Key West and make several C notes as bills fall in your open guitar case). Without fretting any strings, 3 strings were notes that were not C, E, or G, our C triad. By fretting those 3 strings in the manner in which we did now every string is a member of our elite triad. Now to make each string sound clean as you play it.

I remember first learning guitar, the most difficult thing was striking each note of the chord and have them all clean. That is still difficult at times. One thing I truely love about music. No matter how good you are or aren't, no matter how long you play, like fine wine, it improves with age. You can always get better.

I've always been lucky to be blessed with a great, sexy wife, good family and friends and an excellent circle of musician friends as well.

I was finally able to put together a video of one of my arrangements to show an example of transposing to another instrument. It's a combination of Summer in the City by John Sabastian and Summertime by George Gershwin blended with piano, organ and classical guitar. The quality is a bit rough, it was done with a small digital camera but you can get the idea.