I’m mostly known for my guitar music, but, both the archival piano music that is set to appear on the dave stafford / pureambient blog audio companion page, and a series of piano recordings that will become part of the new stafford / orsi project, will change that perception, I hope – while piano hasn’t been my prime focus in more recent years, I still love to play and I think, unfortunately, that most of my piano work has gone completely unnoticed, it’s fallen off the radar (not through any fault of it’s own, as much of it was never released – but I hope to change that now).
so I really hope that by presenting some of the archival work (recorded, luckily, when I was at the height of my keyboard prowess) and some of the current work as well, that I can change this perception for the better, and show and demonstrate a better balance between guitar-based work and keyboard-based work.
there was a time when I would have spent probably double or triple the time I spend playing the guitar, playing the piano instead. this would have been all through my teenage years, and especially from about 18 to 21 years of age (the early 1980s) – at that point in my life, I just played piano all the time.
all the practicing paid off, I had a pretty fluent piano vocabulary, with my speciality being the long arpeggio – as many as six octaves sometimes, as well as tricks such as running four octaves and then nailing a single root note at the top – and usually, hitting it with precision. if you do exercises and scales like this often enough, you can nail them every time – it’s just getting the fingers familiar again…
I also owned and played a hammond organ for many, many years, and there are a large number of archival recordings of hammond music that I spent a lot of time composing and performing and recording, so I look forward to beginning to release some of these organ works later this year, along with many, many piano improvisations as well. you’ll hear a side of my playing that is totally unexpected, and totally unlike the more commonly-perceived ambient loop guitarist that most listeners are familiar with.
it’s remarkable to me too, how very different a musician I was back then, with no formal training, badly-self taught originally, but as luck would have it, at age 13 I met a remarkable musician from whom I learned an enormous amount, and that musician was ted holding, who I’ve mentioned before – ted was my best friend in junior high/high school, I spent a lot of time working on music with him, making many studio recordings, live in studio recordings, and even live performance recordings – ted was the pianist, and I was the guitarist. where ted went and played, I was there to play the guitar parts.
it just worked out that way, but for me, it was a win-win situation, because ted was the ultimate friend – a person with a talent so huge, that I was always in danger of feeling inferior, someone so skilled at piano that when I would watch and listen to him play, I would almost always say afterwards, “you have got to show me how you did that!” and I would make him show me, note by painful note if necessary, until I could play it too.
or at least, something close to it – if the piece was particularly difficult, something like “take a pebble” by emerson, lake & palmer – well, I could play the notes, but not with the clarity, assurance, confidence, speed and power that ted could. he could figure out just about anything – I sat and watched while, by ear, he taught himself (and later, me) large chunks of genesis’ “the lamb lies down on broadway” album – including all of “anyway” and parts of “lilywhite lilith” and “the lamia” – and at that point, those were, to be honest, some of the most complex and musically developed piano parts that tony banks ever wrote – and ted could knock them off as if they were nothing – very impressive.
I still play “anyway” to this day, and when I do, I send a silent “thank you” to ted, without whom, I would not have got past the first four bars of “anyway” – a beautiful track from side 3 of “the lamb”. I’m not sure, but there is at least one take of “anyway” featuring me playing the piano part, so I hope to, fairly soon, publish that and other similar piano pieces onto the dave stafford / pureambient blog audio companion page.
the piano was such a huge part of my early life, we always had one at home, and then, as a teenager, over at ted’s place, we both played the piano and learned together – and we were like musical sponges, I would learn songs and teach them to ted, he would learn songs and then teach them to me…and our playing improved and improved – mine, somewhat less so than ted, although I did reach surprising levels of proficiency for such a young person – at 21, 22 years old, I could play piano really, really well – later though, my attention turned more to guitar, and as I moved into my 30s and 40s – I played much more guitar than keyboards. it is only recently that I’ve begun to take a renewed interest in playing the piano; of course, having the right gear helps a lot, being able to run true piano in sonar and have an 88-key controller with semi-weighted keys.
I’m currently reviewing some of the first recordings made with the new keyboard in early february, and while in my opinion, I’m quite rusty, it’s possible that a few takes might actually be useable – I am considering publishing them anyway, even if imperfect – and if I get a better version of the same song later, I can just post it anyway, later – these piano pieces are intended to be the first entrants to pureambient’s fourth music channel on youtube, a new channel dedicated to the unknown, to any and every performance that isn’t part of my main ambient music…so hopefully, I can locate and mix a piano/vocal number to kick off this new youtube channel – ablackboxhd, named in honour of my favourite peter hammill solo album – and the first piece I plan to upload is a piece from the album, entitled “flying blind” – my own piano and vocal arrangement of it – so that seems appropriate to me.
after that, I would plan to upload many types of unusual performances that are not ambient looping guitar or guitar synth/loops – this channel will feature mostly piano music, vocal music (all the things I’m not known for at all, but that I really do) or anything outside “the norm”…whatever that is!
“the norm…the average – what is this??” – peter hammill
pureambient / dave stafford 