Jim Templeton Current Schedule

If you yearn to experience the joy of playing piano, but you don’t want years of weekly lessons, this short course is for you. In just a few hours you can learn enough secrets of the trade to make piano playing a part of your life.

How is it done? Typical piano lessons teach you note reading, but piano professionals use chords. You will learn all the chords needed to play any pop song in this one session: any song. any style, any key. And you’ll get a healthy dose of insider secrets.

If you already know your way around a keyboard a little, you know enough to enroll in this workshop.

Here’s Jim’s upcoming schedule for Instant Piano (For Hopelessly Busy People). Call the number listed for exact times, costs, and registration information.

Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, anyone can learn to play by ear. This workshop shows you the inside secrets professional piano players use (but never reveal).

You’ll learn how to pick tunes right out of your head. You’ll learn how to get songs off the radio (think of the money you’ll save in sheet music). You’ll even learn how to transpose. This workshop goes beyond mere “ear training.” You’ll get information found nowhere else, and you’ll be picking out tunes by ear — with both hands — from the very first day.

Open to all musicians (not just piano players) who have a basic understanding of chord theory. Beginners should take Instant Piano as a prerequisite.

Here’s Jim’s upcoming schedule for Instant Piano by Ear. Call the number listed for exact times, costs, and registration information.

Play your blues away! This hands-on workshop introduces beginners and experts alike to the uniquely American piano form known as the blues. For beginners it’s a low-stress introduction to piano playing. For those who already play traditional piano this workshop sets the stage for learning many different styles including rock, gospel, jazz, boogie-woogie, and improvising techniques. Learn the secrets of the blues’ unique scale, form, rhythm, and improvisation. And free yourself from sheet music. No prerequisite.

Here’s Jim’s upcoming schedule for Instant Blues and Boogie Piano. Call the number listed for exact times, costs, and registration information.

A follow-up workshop for those who have taken “The Instant Piano” workshop, or who have some experience in playing sheet music from chords. (Music majors and other instrumentalists may benefit from this course.) You’ll learn to find areas in songs which can be varied, expanded, or embellished. Topics covered include:

• Adding introductions to pieces
• Adding endings to pieces
• Creating bass fills in the left hand
• Creating chord fills in the left hand
• Altering given chords (+5, -9, etc.)
• Variations on basic left hand accompaniments

Treble-clef knowledge recommended. Send SASE for free pamphlet to: Ticklin’ the Ivories, 1232 E 34th, Spokane, WA 99203.

Here’s Jim’s 2004 schedule for Advanced Instant Piano. Call the number listed for exact times, costs, and registration information.

By popular demand, here is the course that should prove exciting and educational for amateur and professional piano-aficionados! The price is right, and EVERYONE should get something out of this workshop. The course will be improvised, and I will speak to the questions and curiosity of the people present. I will get you playing, and will entertain you voluminously. My sense of humor alone will make this course worthwhile.

I will be prepared with tips, licks, suggestions, & approaches to offer, when your questions run out. There will be printed notes on several topics. Possible areas of discussion include: jazz approaches, improvising, theory, using the circle of 5ths, effective methods of learning, practice tips, fingering principles — you name it!

Prerequisite is chord knowledge equivalent to the Instant Piano course, and treble clef knowledge. Contact me if in doubt (509-624-3173, or JimIvories@aol.com).

The materials fee of $12 is for Robert Laughlin’s Tricks and Licks tape. (This will be waived for anyone taking TWO of the other workshops.)

Send SASE for free pamphlet to: Ticklin the Ivories, 1232 E 34th, Spokane, WA 99203.

Jim Templeton — pianist, clinician, and teacher — graduated in music from Washington State University, and holds a Masters Degree in piano from Louisiana State University. He has taught at half a dozen colleges, universities, and conservatories both in the USA, and in Denmark, where he resided for 16 years. He holds various honors, including Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the 1993 Washington State Artist Trust Grant, ($5000), for one of his original jazz compositions.

He can be heard playing jazz piano — or vibraphone — throughout the northwest states, and travels extensively, teaching chord piano to students of all ages.