music is not an athletic event.
music is not a merit system for technical prowess.
the idea is to be able to play what's in your head and heart-not easy, but you need only enough technique for that-unless you aspire to be a studio musician or have
to be an excellent reader on band gigs.

I can read music but play sax by ear. I can play in any
key without thinking for one second about transposition.
I can play single notes in the right hand on kb in any
key without thinking for one second about transposition.
since i am trained as a single-note player, I cannot play the chord voicings without thinking about transposition.

I can understand some advantages re hand position
choices that those with traditional piano training using all
keys enjoy. To me, at this point, I do not have the time or
the discipline to accomplish that without sacrificing the
here and now of performance. My goal was to get to the
same level of unconscious flow with 2 hands on kb as i
have on sax and single-notes in rh on kb. To that end,
I decided that since i was not a pianist and did not have
the inclination or chops for fully weighted keys, I would
concentrate on getting as good as I could in C, and use
the transpose button. I don't have a big problem with the
occasional chord and key anomolies within tunes, and
it seems Berlin didn't have that either. He just knew
being a concert or studio pianist was not his goal, and he
chose to use F#, where he was already most fluent.

He didn't seem to miss the creativity of having different
hand positions that lead to different ideas. I think it was
because he was of my philosophy..you should try to be
able to play what's in your head, not have your hand
position or your technique decide what you should play.
What i can offer myself as a singer and other singers is
a consistency of performance from key to key..something
only the very best pianists can do, because they do not
use a transposer. It is not boring if what is in your head
is not boring. And every singer has a "best" key for every
tune..even if they have a wonderfully flexible vocal range.
Sometimes that key is B, or F#, or E, a key outside the
realm of what 99% of pianists can play fluently as another.

So i'm not knocking the traditional wisdom, I'm just not
buying into it lock, stock, and barrel as some others.
There were no transpose buttons back in the day. The
rules keep changing. It's what comes out that counts.
I couldn't care less if somebody "fools" me playing a
difficult passage by transposing to an easier-fingering
key. Music is not a merit system for technical prowess.


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Miami Mo