Thanks everyone! I appreciate your good wishes.

I had a good day yesterday, by the afternoon both hands were fairly loose and I was able to do some stretching and flexing exercises with the hand still in a cast. I am starting to feel a little better about the odds of full recuperation.

I AM right handed, but I have always tried to develop a “two right hands “ style… One thing I felt very early into my career was, we are paying for a bass player, why should I use my left hand to cover stuff he’s already doing? Lol. So it was more a case of the left hand is the piano player, and the right hand is the horn section, or the left hand is the Orchestra, and the right hand is the organ player, etc. etc.…

If I had multi year house gigs and started to feel a little bored, or playing things rote, I would create reverse keyboard registrations with whatever I usually played in the right hand at the bottom of the keyboard and the left hand sound at the top And then just try to do the same thing, but with the opposite hands. This also helped sometimes to break me out of licks I was over playing, and sometimes come up with parts that were more focused because they were played on the other hand. Then I would swap back to the original registrations, but play the part that the other hand had come up with!

It wasn’t until about 1999 that I finally accepted a job playing left-hand base and keyboards in a 10 piece power funk band on Bourbon Street. That was definitely an eye-opener for me, playing alongside one of New Orleans greatest drummers. Their previous keyboard player had spent a lifetime doing this, so I had some serious shedding to do as I rarely spend much time thinking about the baseline because someone else was playing it lol.

After returning back to Florida after a year of doing that, I fell into doing the same thing with another local band for about four or five years. A lot of fun! Again, sometimes I would reverse the keyboard, play the bass with the right hand and rhythm with the left. This is an extremely good layout for doing a lot of reggae, as the baseline in reggae is as important as the melody, but the rhythm is fairly steady and constant.

My next couple of months, however, is going to be quite different, playing EVERYTHING with the left-hand, and nothing with the right at all! This is going to be fun to see what I come up with now. Maybe everything has a reason, and this happened just to help break me out of the rut. I have been in playing with arrangers and tracks for the last 15 years.…!

Thank God for technology! This might have been a much more difficult task in the old days of “one sound per keyboard“… I will keep you posted as things progress, maybe do a little recording and see what you think… 🙏❤️🎹