david's corner

emily bear

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow pianist, emily bear, in Las Vegas. Today she dropped her new album, “Diversity”!!! To celebrate the launch of her new album, Playground Sessions will be offering 50% off of quarterly subscriptions for the next 24 hours if her page reaches 12,000 likes by the end of the day! Let’s help get Emily to 12,000 likes: https://www.facebook.com/EmilyBearPiano

Some of Emily’s new songs will be featured in the Playground Sessions library, so stay tuned! In the meantime, check out “Diversity” on iTunes and Amazon: http://bit.ly/11QiW3o and http://amzn.to/11fwf2h.

ryan seacrest finals

I made it to the FINALS in Ryan Seacrest’s competition for the best Justin Timberlake cover!!! If you have a second, please click on the link below and vote for my video! Voting is open daily, so feel free to continue voting over the next few days, or weeks, as long as the contest is open. Thanks!!

http://ryanseacrest.com/march-music-madness-2013-justin-timberlake/

ryan seacrest contest

I just made it to the semifinals of On Air with Ryan Seacrest’s contest for the best Justin Timberlake cover!!! If you have a second, please click on the link and show some love with a vote! Thanks!

http://ryanseacrest.com/2013/03/18/semi-finals-who-has-the-best-justin-timberlake-cover-vote/

playground in usa today and billboard

Yesterday, after driving all around the city, I finally picked up a few copies of USA Today’s newspaper to read the article about Playground Sessions! The mention was short and sweet, but it was still nice to see our company in the paper! Here’s a shot I took of the article:

Playground was also mentioned on Billboard’s website and Twitter!

I’m glad to see word getting out about what the Playground team and I are up to! Stay tuned for more updates.

quincy jones joins playground sessions

Today Quincy Jones announced his involvement with Playground Sessions! His tweet and facebook posts were supplemented by three articles that can be read here:

http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/music/music-legend-quincy-jones-launches-new-music-education-application-playground-sessions-1.76735

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/19/playground-sessions/

http://mashable.com/2013/02/19/playground-sessions/

The team and I are very excited to be working with a living legend and we look forward to helping people learn the piano!

grammy week 2013

Last night’s GRAMMY Awards wrapped up a week of GRAMMY events. Luckily, the Playground team and I were able to take part in a couple of the GRAMMY festivities leading up to the big night. On Thursday, Chris and I attended a special event, honoring Quincy Jones and Al Schmitt. It was nice being able to support two great musicians!

On Saturday, Chris and I then took part in a GRAMMY celebrity basketball game - not as players, we were court-side demonstrating Playground to those in attendance.

I was surprised at the level of competition on the court. With 5:52 left in the 4th Quarter (as seen in the picture above), the score was 94 to 79. Surprisingly, the East team came back and only lost by 5 - 109 to 104.

It was a fun and busy week. I look forward to next year’s events.

namm 2013

Today I spent a few hours at the NAMM show in Anaheim. This was my second time attent the NAMM show and this year there were a few products that caught my eye. One of the products that I liked was called a Loog Guitar. Loog Guitars are designed for kids, so they’re small, only have 3 strings, and are easy to assemble. Another product that I liked was Note Flight, an online notation program. The third and final product that caught my eye was Megpoid Vocaloid. Apparently, Megpoid is already really popular in Japan, and the makers of the product want to bring its popularity here to America.

A few other cool things about today: I ran into Darkchild while walking around the show room, I met Young Guru, and I got to play on this piano:

I had a great time at NAMM 2013 and I’m looking forward to the next one!