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 truly. And because I mean, hello, it helps other piano teachers just like you find the show and feel
a little less alone in chaos. Also, come hang out with me on the brand new YouTube channel The Scrappy Piano Teacher. I'll be posting more this summer. I'm going to post some extra stuff to you with some goodies like reviews and all that kind of stuff. And don't forget to subscribe at the Scrappy pianoteacher.com so you can stay in the loop with all the happenings. Plus grab some new free resources the second day drop. Thanks for listening all you Scrappy Vienna teachers.
I'm so thankful for you and I will see you next time. Bye.