Jeannie Allen started playing piano (by ear) when she was just 5 yrs old. She has played piano in numerous churches in the DFW area for over 25 years. Her experience includes playing piano at a popular local family restaurant and for numerous bands as well as playing for over 15 churches. After playing for choirs, soloists, congregational hymns, and various trios and quartets, and weddings and celebrations, she finally decided her true joy came from improvising her own arrangements of well-known old hymns as well as her own original compositions. She developed her home-recording studio, New Dreams Sound, and began to record and produce all her own recordings.
Her love of piano started when her mother taught piano lessons when she was a child growing up in a musical family. Her mother and father both sang duets and her father always needed her to play piano for him in a lower range on piano because he had such a deep bass voice. That taught Jeannie early on to learn how to transpose by ear on the piano.
Her mother started her with piano lessons at age 7 and she has since taken lessons at the college level and expanded her ability as she played different music styles at all the churches she enjoyed playing for.
She has taught beginner and intermediate piano for over 25 years with emphasis on sight-reading skills, rhythm, theory, recognizing chords and developing the ability to embellish the written music with chord arrangements and arpeggios.
Also, she teaches understanding how to transpose music and encourages exploring the possibility of playing by ear, if a student has the natural ability to hear music and apply to the keyboard.
Learning to play in all scales on the piano is the ultimate goal for her continuing piano students.
Jeannie desires that all her students learn to love playing piano, not only for personal entertainment, but also for the possibility of pursuing a career in music as a pianist in the adventurous and exciting field of music whether they become music educators, or band musicians, or pursue a career as a solo artist, all of which Jeannie has achieved in some form throughout her life of music.
Jeannie is currently active in her Celtic/Folk band...(link: www.CrystalFieldsBand.com) and is the pianist for First Christian Church, Cleburne, TX, where she also teaches piano.
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