Friday, August 1, 2014

Thanks for Listening


Hello my music friends,

Well, summer is in full swing, and I love being outdoors. My wife and I are enjoying biking, kayaking, and gardening. We have finished up a lot of outside projects and are now maintaining the gardens. We redesigned and built a new entry way so my father-in-law, who is 90 years old, does not have to walk up or down any steps. We also built a new patio from the ground up. We excavated the dirt, my wife built the walls and then we worked together installing and leveling the pavers. It was back breaking work and we had to be careful not to smash our fingers! I suppose construction and piano are not the most compatible occupations, but you do what you have to do, right?

Musically, I have also been busy. I had a lot of work done on my piano, going beyond tuning, extra voicing, and getting rid of some buzzing overtones, so it is sounding better than ever. This has made it easier to prepare for the coming benefit concert in Gettysburg at 2 pm on August 17th, as well as the house concert here at our home on August 16th. Michael Dulin will be sharing the performance stage with me for both performances. Tickets are available here. All proceeds go to the Adams County Library System, raising money to increase their capacity. The venue is located at the Lutheran Theological Seminary Chapel at 147 Seminary Ridge, Gettysburg, Pa. It is a gorgeous bulding with great acoustics, and the piano is a Yamaha C7, so it should be a great concert.

Michael and I are working on 2 concert tours, one in the late fall to the deep south and one in April 2015 to Seattle , Spokane , Portland and surrounding areas. More details to come on these concerts.

We will also host a house concert here at our home in south central Pennsylvania on September 14th at 2 pm. Reservations are required, as seating is limited. Contact me if you are interested. The house concerts are a blast, seating is close to the piano, and I talk about the songs and how they were composed. Cookies are always enjoyed during the break.

I have been busy transcribing all the songs from the latest album "Coming Home", and have only 4 more to go. It is a labor of love, and takes time and concentration, two things I run short of sometimes. But, slowly but surely, I am getting them on paper.

For those of you who may be interested in the business side of music, it is a fast changing environment. Difficult in some ways, but rewarding in others. iTunes is beginning to fade into the distance. People are streaming music more and more and not buying mp3s. Why buy it if you can just stream it on Spotify or Pandora? Pandora does pay a small royalty "per spin" for any song that is played but it takes millions of spins to make any money with them. So please, if you have the opportunity to create a Greg Maroney station on your favorite streaming source, please do, it helps a lot!


I've had several fans email to ask why my CDs are different prices on different sites, especially Amazon, where the whole solo piano genre went up to $20 a CD recently. Just so you know, the artists are not the ones that decide the pricing, that is determined by the selling site and then they take a percentage of the sale, 55% in the case of Amazon. So all I can say in response is, go directly to the artists' websites to support your favorite musicians.

Well ...that’s most of the music news for now. I hope to see some of you at the house concerts and in Gettysburg next month.

Thanks for listening,

Greg Maroney
www.gregmaroney.com