Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Scrappy Piano Teacher
Podcast, the show for independent piano teachers who
are building studios with heart, grit, and a heck of a lot of
coffee. I'm your host, Jacqueline, and
today's episode is when you're going to want to bookmark.
I am chatting with William Perry, the creator of Piano
Music Database, a powerful tool built by a teacher for teachers.
And if you've ever found yourself frantically flipping
through books, scrolling screenshots, or begging Facebook
groups for music ideas midway through a lesson, Yup, I do that
here all the time. Well, I have to tell you.
William's story and this resource are about to change how
you plan, search, and organize music for your students.
You're going to love this. I'm going to jump right in.
Thanks for being here. Hi teachers, thank you so much
for joining me today. I have a special guest who I've
been wanting to have on my podcast for a long time, Liam
Perry, and you are joining us from Piano Music Database.
But before we get into that, I want to talk a little bit more
about you as a teacher because I know you because you're here in
Cincinnati with me. But if you wouldn't mind just
sharing a little bit about who you are, your background as a
pianist of? Course, Yeah, Yeah, I'm in
Cincinnati now. I love Cincinnati.
It's a great town, a lot of great music.
It's a great place to be. MTNA is headquartered here, so
it's a, It's a lot going on. Yeah.
I been playing piano my whole life.
I did not come from a musical family.
My parents are not musical. Nobody in my family does music.
So I sort of stumbled upon music on my own first or second grade.
A student brought in a keyboard to show and tell and was like,
playing it for everyone. And they were all like, Oh my
God, this is so cool. So I saw that and I was like, I
I need to play piano. This seems really exciting.
I started taking piano lessons. My parents always told me that I
was a very good practicer and never had to be asked to
practice. I really enjoyed enjoyed piano
as a child. I guess like a ideal student or
something. I started getting very serious
into piano in high school and applied to college and and went
to undergrad for piano performance and in school
started teaching piano at the school that I first learned
piano. And so it was a very great
experience being able to do that in in undergrad.
From there, decided that I would study pedagogy and so for my
graduate program is in was in piano performance and pedagogy
at Florida State University. Since then I've been teaching in
Florida. I'm from Florida and then moved
to Ohio in 2020 right during the pandemic and I've been teaching
at academies in in Cincinnati and then now I have my own
studio in Pleasant Ridge. I did.
Not know you were from Florida? I know that you're good friends
with my good friend Jill, which is How I Met you.
My wife and I met who is also a pianist.
Her name is Ariadne and we met teaching piano at Piano Academy
in Tampa, FL and we were both there for I was there for two
years, she was there for one year.
She left to go to CCM for her doctorate, so I went with her.
We met there, we started dating, and then I just followed her up
to Cincinnati. So that's how we ended up here.
I think that Jill was already out of CCM so I don't actually
remember how they met, but it's like CCM connections in some
way. Yeah, I I was under the
impression you all went to CCM together, so I just learned
something completely new about. Yeah, I just sort of like
attached myself to CCM stuff even though I never went there.
Well, it's great people, it's a great place to attach yourself
to. So non musical family, you kind
of started it and now you're married to a musician as well.
So start to a wonderful musical family.
So you guys being teachers, is that how you got the idea for
Piano Music Database? Were you seeing a need and you
wanted to fill it? It was a need for myself,
really. I had this adult student that
I've been teaching for a while, and she was very particular
about the kinds of music that she would play.
So I had things that I needed her to learn.
We weren't in a method book. And so I just had all these
concepts I was introducing to her and she would tell me very
bluntly, like, I don't like this piece.
I can't play this one, I don't want to do this one.
So I was always looking for music for this student and it
was kind of a pain because there weren't a lot of good resources
that were doing or that were giving me the kinds of pieces
that I was looking for, giving me access to the pieces I was
looking for. So I just started creating my
own spreadsheets for, for repertoire, analyzing the music
and coming up with the teaching concepts in them so that I could
like have like a list of pieces I would pull for her and other
students. And eventually I realized that
this was something that other teachers probably would be
interested in. And so I talked to my brother
who is a web developer, and I was like, how can I turn this
spreadsheet into a website or something that other people can
use? And that's when it really
started to take off for me. That was in 2020, so May of
2020, right during the pandemic. I, I feel like I have all these
random lists of music in different places, or I'll see
something on social media and I'll tag it, I'll screenshot it,
but everything is so scattered. So when I actually need to look
at stuff, which is usually in the middle of a lesson, and I
never know where to look, like I'm like, wait, where did I put
that? Is that my drive?
Is that in Word? You know, so I can see how this
would make so much more sense because it's all in one place.
Yes, yeah. And I'm like a natural
organizer. My, I have like a very
analytical brain, which maybe doesn't work so well for music,
but in this case, putting both of my interests together, I just
am like obsessed with organizing things and trying to understand
how everything works together and to make it like for me, give
me kind of a broad sense of, of, of everything.
So this project just sort of like slotted itself really
nicely into my. I love that.
OK, so and let's talk about piano music database itself.
So this is much more than just having a spreadsheet saved in
your computer. You have it where we have
filters and different things. Could you just describe what
exactly this database is and why it's so useful for teachers?
Yes. So we have analyzed now
thousands of pieces, myself and some other teachers that I work
with on this project, we go in and we find all of the teaching
concepts in the pieces. We also find and categorize the
key signature, the time signature, the mood of the
piece, the style, any kind of like theme, like animals or
trains or whatever the piece might be about.
That's important. Yes, some students, definitely.
And so every piece that goes into the database has all these
data points and that allows teachers who are using it to
then apply filters to find pieces with all of those data
points that they need in their teaching.
And it's very like specific for, for teaching.
So imagine like you have a late elementary student who's
learning how to play eighth notes.
And so you're, you need a piece that will help reinforce their
skills with 8th notes. And they like playing pieces
about animals, for example. So you can find all those things
really easily in the database. You just go to the levels
filter, you click it and you do 8 elementary, then you do 8th
notes teaching concept, and then you do the animals theme.
And it's just going to show you all the results in our database
where the pieces match all three of those those qualifications.
You can imagine like how long that would take with other
sources where it'd be like I'm looking through the repertoire
guidebook and I'm just flipping around and I'm an hour has gone
behind. I haven't found anything close
to what I'm looking for. Or if I go to my library and I'm
searching through my anthologies and I'm trying to find this, it
would be very time consuming. So we're basically taking all of
that effort that you would that you would have to expend finding
in different locations, putting it all on in one place and
giving you the power to search through all the data that we
collect. That's amazing.
I think it's Joy. Morin just had a recital and it
was food themed. A lot of teachers have these
themes. I think it's such a great idea.
And I know that's gonna be hard to find the music to fit.
You know, maybe it is jungle animals or food or that kind of
thing. So you could probably look that
stuff up in your database. I have done that for my own
students for their recitals cuz I do like doing themed recitals.
So yeah, it's very easy on the database.
You just go to the search page and you go to themes and you can
like type your own themes out and see if it comes up.
You can find closely related themes.
So like if we just had spring recital season, so if I wanted
to find pieces about spring, I could just do the tag, the theme
tag for spring and it would show me at this point probably 100 or
so pieces that have spring related to spring in some way.
And then I could go through and start applying levels filters.
So I could find a spring piece for my pre readers.
I could find a spring piece for my intermediate and elementary
all the way up to like master level if there was pieces like
that. So you could essentially plan or
find pieces for your whole recital using the the database
and it would be pretty simple. To think about how much time
that would save somebody, I mean, it sounds like you just
took hours of research and put it into minutes.
That's amazing. Yes, we're kind of doing the
research for you. Like ahead of time we were going
through and categorizing all the stuff.
So then you don't have to do that on your own.
So is this just supplemental music or is this methods as
well? Is it a little bit of everything
you're just always adding we? Have a little bit of everything
we have. We just now started working
through method books. We have several of them already
in the database and we are working on adding more of them.
So that's in there. We have supplemental repertoire
by like modern living composers, pedagogical composers and non
pedagogical like. We have standard classical Rep
as well. Public domain music by all of
the famous composers. And then we also are focusing a
lot of our effort on getting underrepresented composers in
the database too, so you can use it to find a little bit of
everything. I love that so much.
So let's say that you have this list.
Do you have websites and all that good stuff on how to access
the music if we need to purchase it?
Yes, so, but we are in, in a sense we're kind of like Kayak.
If you're familiar with Kayak where you go and it's got all
the hotels that fit your criteria and then from there you
go to the hotel's website or someplace else to buy them.
You the the hotel. So we're kind of like that.
We show you all the pieces, you go to the pieces page and you
can see all the information about it, the video and all
that. And then it will show you all
the different locations where it's available to purchase.
So most of the time Sheet music Plus or Amazon, but increasingly
we are just linking directly to the composer's website or
directly to the publishers website.
If it's a public domain piece, we'll do all of that, plus we'll
show the IMSLP page for it. So you'll have an option if you
want to buy a newer edition of it.
Or if you want to wade through all of the editions on IMSLP to
find a free 1, you could do that too.
Wow. OK, hold on.
You said videos. Does that mean that we get to
preview the music? Yes.
As well. So we'll go to YouTube and we'll
try to find the best recording we can of each of the pieces.
So most of the music has a recording, but not everything
has a recording yet. So I would say at this point,
maybe 85 to 90% of the pieces are recorded and on YouTube.
So we've just linked those. This has had to have taken so
much work. Yeah, behind the scenes.
Yeah, I do split it up. I have a team of of teachers who
helped me with this and they'll be set on tasks.
Like they just go, one person goes and finds all the videos,
one person finds all the teaching concept, one does the
leveling. And I kind of then it's all sent
to me. And then I do like a final
review of it all before it gets published.
But yeah, at the beginning I was doing it all on my own and I
realized that that was a severe bottleneck.
Like it was just getting piled up at me.
And I was like, had all these ideas and all this music go on
and it's just not enough time to do it all.
So yeah, it's, there's, there's a few people that that work with
me on this. I just had my recital finish up
a few weeks ago and the lesson after we do kind of a reflection
and then I find myself with some students.
So what do you want to work on this summer?
Do you want to work on a special project?
You know, because summer is coming up and I always try to do
something a little bit different.
So I could pull up this website in the middle of a lesson, I
could do like a beep bop boop type thing, Type it in and in
front of the student I could have them listen to the piece
and we could decide right then and there if they want it.
Oh yeah, put. Them to preview.
Yeah, totally. So a new, along those same
lines, a new feature that we're coming out with is the ability
to like put everything into customized lists.
So you could do that in a lesson with your student, find all
these pieces, put them into a list and then you could like
send the list to them and have them listen to them again at
home. Or you could do it like before
the lesson and send it to them in between a lesson and have
them listen to everything. There's a lot of ways that you
can use that feature. And that's a very exciting thing
that for me because like the search engine is exciting
enough, but also being able to then do other things on the site
besides music or besides finding music, like organizing all the
music, is very exciting to me too.
See, this is just goes to show why it's so important that
teachers are the ones who do this because you know what to
look for because you're experiencing it first hand.
Let's say that you're maybe not so much a techie teacher like
you said you were very analytical and spreadsheet.
I am like miss post it notes everywhere and learning new
things on the computer for me take a lot of time.
Would you say that this is pretty simple for teachers to
use? Like pretty user friendly or is
that something you've been working on?
Yes. So we're really focused on it
being easy to use. It's just a website.
It's not like an app or a piece of software that needs to be
downloaded first or anything. You just need to create an
account to to access it, which is a fairly simple process.
But the the site has been built to work well on desktop, tablet,
phone and we try to design it so that it's very minimal that
there's only enough information to get you what you need.
We don't we try not to like blast you with all kinds of
things on the UI. So it's, it is fairly simple and
if you're used to like shopping online or using a search engine
for anything like Amazon or something, it's fairly similar
to that. You have your filters on one
side, you have your results on the other and like the ability
to sort and that sort of thing. So it it we tried to mimic other
sites that have search engines so that it feels natural and
there's not a big learning curve going from one to the next.
OK, awesome. Well, I'm really good at
shopping on Amazon, so we'll be just fine in the area.
Played around with your website. I have to admit, I, I keep
meaning to get on there because I know you have new promotions.
You have all kinds of new stuff because you were showing it to
me at the MTNA, which by the way, if anybody's going to the
NCKPI saw you posted on a post, you're going to have a zoo there
as well. OK, so everybody needs to visit
William at NCKP for sure. And you'll be wowed by this if
you don't just jump on and do it anyway because you should.
So I know that at NCKP you plan on having some special
announcements, but until then you're still kind of sampling
some stuff out. So how can a teacher join and
can they access all the features?
Do they need to pay for it? How?
How is it work right now? Right now we're in a beta
testing period, which we're calling early access.
So anybody who goes to pianomusicdatabase.com creates
an account for free. You can access all of the
features of the site that includes the search engine, the
ability to favorite a work and then creating unlimited custom
lists of works. All that is free for now for you
to try out and basically give us feedback on and make sure that
we are developing the features the way that you want them.
And then at NCKP, when we launched the official
subscription, we'll be giving away coupon codes and discounts
for for everybody who signed up for the early access period.
Oh wow. So it's pretty much like if we
Join Now early June, you pretty much get like a four or five
week free in depth trial is how we can look at it.
When you try, when you sign up now, it's, you know, you're kind
of helping us shape the the future of the database.
You're giving us feedback, useful feedback about how we can
develop the product and make it better and more useful for you.
So, so it is as a thank you for that, we will be giving discount
codes afterwards. So awesome.
OK, so it's been up there for a bit and it has been free.
So have you gotten any feedback lately that's kind of surprised
you as you've released this beta feature?
So I go to these conferences a lot and I meet a lot of people
who are, we're just very excited about this project because
they'll tell me, oh, I, I don't know, like I've always wanted
something like this. And I've never had the time or
the energy to, to make a project like this come to reality.
And it is, it's really great to hear people say that because it
is a lot of work, you know, like every piece that goes in you
have to do an in depth analysis for and you know, they're like
the piano repertoire is endless. It just keeps going and going.
More people are making music and there's all this and endless
music going backwards too. And so it is a lot of work.
But it is really great to hear piano teachers like me using the
software to find music for their students.
I've also had collegiate professors tell me that they're
using it in their pedagogy classes, which has been really
awesome to hear. So just a lot of positive
feedback in terms of like the depth of this project and how
like how complex it is. It's been great.
It has to be so encouraging too, especially after all that work,
to hear that. I wouldn't even think about them
using that in classes. But that makes so much sense.
Sometimes I hear these things and I think about all that we
have access to and I think about 20 years ago when I was, you
know, a new teacher and I'm thinking how did I no wonder why
I literally just stuck with the same method book for so many
years and now we can just do something like this.
So I. This is great.
I remember doing that when I was younger too.
And I actually, I find that I kind of have the same sort of
feeling when I'm on the website where I'm just like perusing
through books. I have a lot more information
about it than like perusing through a book because I can
then go and go to the composer's page and learn more about the
composer and then go from the composer's page to other music
of theirs. And like, there's this web of
connections for all the music, so you get even more out of it.
But at the core for me is the the feeling of discovering new
music and just kind of browsing and seeing, seeing what I can
confine. That's a great feeling.
And yes, it is digital and so you don't get the physical
feeling of opening up a book, but I try to recreate that as
much as possible in the sort of digital format.
I, yeah, I and you know what else I love that you said at the
beginning is how you try to link it as much as possible to the
composer. So if it's a living composer,
you try to get to that page. And I think that support is such
a big deal and it makes me want to go on there and support it
just so that I can support them directly as much as possible.
So if somebody wants to try it out, is it just
pianomusicdatabase.com? Is that right?
That is it. Yeah, you'll, you'll be, you'll
get. That'll take you to the home
page and you can create an account there and that'll open
up all of the features of the site for you.
So they can just go to the website, they can just create
their free account, they'll get some specials after NCKP time.
Is that right? And then are there other ways to
connect if we want to do so before all that good stuff
happens? Yes, there's a Facebook group
that we just started. It's just called Piano Music
Database Users and anybody who creates an account can sign up
as a member of that group. And that will be our community
hub for for the database where you can ask questions from me
and other people on the team, connect with other users.
We've got composers and publishers who are joining that
group too. They'll probably be promoting
their music. It will make promotions with
them, let you know about new, new things that are added to the
database. You'll also get to vote on new
features to come to the database or new music that we're going to
add. We want to make sure that we're
connecting with our users and giving our users what they feel
like they need. So if you want more from us and
you want to connect with us at the very beginning of this
project, the Facebook group is going to be a good way to do
that. And it's free.
It doesn't cost anything to go on there.
Yeah. So if any composers are
listening, they need to definitely be in that group.
Yes, for sure. And we have any composer or
publisher can create an account and start adding their music
themselves. So we already have lots of
composers who have started to do that, especially independent
composers who just have their own website and are promoting
their music that way. This is a really great
opportunity to to promote your music to piano teachers.
Because when a teacher goes to the search engine to find a
piece and they've put in all of their characteristics that
they're looking for and they find a piece that matches
everything, you know that they're very likely to then go
and buy that music because they already know that it matches
what they need. When by the time we send our
user over to your site, they're probably going to buy the music.
We are trying to help everyone out.
Bigger publishers can be on the site and smaller independent
composers can get benefit from it as much.
And you are also on Instagram, so if somebody is not on
Facebook, you can go to Instagram, but they should
definitely join that Facebook page and then they can connect
with you directly from there if they have any questions.
And there's there's contact buttons on the site.
Every page of the site has like a feedback too.
So if you ever run into an issue, there's ways to contact
us directly if like something is wrong or you have a question.
Awesome. I am so excited for you.
All right, well, William, this was awesome.
Thank you so much for joining me.
And I'm I'm going to look, I'm going to be watching.
I'm excited to see where the sun's up.
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for letting me come on and talk about things.
Thanks. I really appreciate.
It listen that's so good. Thank you William.
Big thank you to William for sharing both the behind the
scenes work and all of the incredible ways teachers can
start using piano music database right now.
And if you found this helpful, which I know you did, be sure to
leave a five star review on your favorite podcast app for yours
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I'm so thankful for you and I will see you next time.
Bye.