A weekly hour for people who are practicing piano improv on their own.
Thursdays at noon Eastern, live.
I started taking piano lessons when I was four years old. I had an early start, a good teacher, and I seem to have had some aptitude for it, and mostly I just loved it. So by the time I was eleven and quit lessons to play sports, I was a pretty good piano player for my age. In high school I picked it up again for a couple of years and played some fairly complex pieces. I never entered a competition, though. I played in one or two recitals when I was around ten, a Mozart sonata, with one judge in the room and nobody else.
It would be easy to look back now and wonder what might have happened if I'd figured out a little sooner that my odds were better at the piano than on a basketball court.
But I think it's very possible that I already knew where that road went. Nothing scary was about to happen to me. It's just that somewhere down that road, somebody asks you to sit down and play for a hall full of people.
I bring all this up because playing the piano can be scarier than it looks from the outside, and at levels we don't always appreciate in each other. Improvising can be scarier still, since there's no piece to hide behind.
Vibe Tribe is a way through that territory with more ease, and with company.
We meet on Thursdays at noon Eastern for an hour. It's a warm group. We talk about the practice and about what we noticed over the week, and whoever's up for it plays for a few minutes. It's not a performance, and nobody is baring their soul. It's a few minutes of experimenting out loud with an approach to sound that most of us have found to be more accessible, and a good deal more fun, than we expected.
Where a person sits on the scale of piano facility has nothing to do with how they're received here.
The practice itself is something you do alone. You sit down at the piano, you play for ten minutes, something happens or it doesn't, and then you get up and go on with your day. That's where the real work gets done, and nothing takes the place of it.
But there's a limit to what any of us can notice on our own. Other people ask questions you might not have thought of, or that you forgot about, or that you weren't quite up to asking yourself. Somebody describes something they ran into on Tuesday, and you recognize it right away, because you ran into the same thing and never had a word for it.
It also helps to find out that you're not the only one who feels the way you do about the piano. That's a hard thing to arrange on your own.
And if you haven't been playing much lately, that's worth bringing to the group rather than a reason to stay away. Whatever it is that sits between a person and ten minutes at the piano is usually the same material the practice works with anyway. We look at it together. Nobody gets scolded for it.
Some parts of this go more smoothly, and a good deal more quickly, because of an hour a week with other people who are doing it too.
We meet on Thursdays at noon Eastern, live, for an hour.
No two weeks are the same. Some weeks we open by playing and hardly talk at all. Other weeks something has us curious and we stay with it for most of the hour. Usually there are at least a couple of rounds of playing in there somewhere.
Playing for the group can seem intimidating the first time, and it stops seeming that way pretty fast. We do listen closely, and we are listening for quality. But quality here doesn't come from technique. It comes from heart, and from somebody being honest about where they actually are that day. That has nothing to do with how long a person has been playing. An adult who can feel something uncomfortable and stay with it while they play is bringing plenty.
We improvise the call itself, moment by moment, and let it go where it wants to go. It would be a little strange to do it any other way.
The main thing is that it's a place to bring whatever you've actually got that week, and whatever that is usually turns out to be rich material. There's nothing here to be embarrassed about. It amounts to each of us doing a bit of shadow work in the company of people who are rooting for us.
You're also welcome to come and say nothing at all. Plenty of people do, for a while.
Membership includes the Thursday call and the recordings of it, a growing library of session and content videos, and the community forum, which runs between calls and is a good place to put a question you'd rather not sit on for a week.
On a personal level, sharing and being witnessed was such a big leap for me, very empowering and nurturing.
Evelyn Schubert
There is nothing to fear here. If there is, you get to play that out on the piano.
Anne Mullin
I improvised a piece that brought tears to my eyes, because it 'played me', I was just there experiencing music come through. Simply magical.
Paul Heumiller
If you're in any of the Tune U on Piano programs, Vibe Tribe is already included for as long as your program runs. There's nothing to do and nothing to pay.
If you've taken Playing the Fields, or one of the Tune U on Piano courses, or worked with me one on one, you're welcome to join the Vibe Tribe on its own.
That isn't a bar about being good enough. It's just that the hour assumes you have a practice to talk about. If you don't have one yet, Playing the Fields takes about an hour and gives you one.
$59 a month, or $590 a year. You can stop whenever you want.
We meet Thursdays at noon Eastern. You're welcome to join us.
Whether you choose to work with me or not, what matters most is that you practice aligning what you think, feel, say, and do in real time. That kind of coherence quietly nourishes your life and the lives around you in ways that ripple further than you can see. Change comes from participation, not affiliation. If this is the right place for you to practice, begin here. If not, follow what feels alive and supportive to you. Either way, I wish you well.