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BenThames

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About BenThames

  • Birthday 01/30/1998

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  1. As a young guy that's very interested in getting into session work in general (beyond the one song I've played on thus far for someone on AirGigs) & specifically in Nashville sometime in the future, I'm very excited about this!
  2. Another big one of mine I forgot - the old NY session player Paul Griffin. I love his work on Sign in Stranger by Steely Dan, but hearing his piano track on Don McLean's American Pie was what introduced me to him, & really influenced my playing a lot. ( )
  3. For everyone who's got Spotify, here's a link to my artist page. It's all instrumental piano stuff at the moment, so I'm a little nervous posting here among a bunch of fellow keyboard players, but, oh well. You can also find me on Apple Music/iTunes if you just type in my name (Ben Thames, just as the username would lead you to believe)
  4. Hey everyone, as my username may suggest - my name is Ben Thames. I'm 21 years old, from Northwest Florida, & I've been playing music for about 5 years. I introduced myself a little in another thread, but figured I'd also do it in the proper thread. I've always loved music, but never really had any desire to play it until after a real nasty concussion took me out of high school sports completely. All my friends were musicians, so I figured I'd pick up bass. I started learning on a Monday, & that Wednesday I was sort of thrown into the deep end in my church's youth band. (I actually had to have one of my friends tab out where the notes were for all the songs - couldn't even follow a chord chart, lol). About 6 months go by - I've learned the bass neck really well, learned some cool bass parts - everything was good, but I really wanted to play an instrument that could stand on its own as well. Due to becoming a musician, I start to listen to music differently. I no longer heard it as one overall sound, but a bunch of individual instrument parts coming together. Because of this, I started listening to songs I'd been hearing for years completely differently. So, I'm listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Pronounced" album one day, & hear Billy Powell's piano break on the song "Things Goin' On". Instantly, I thought, "that's what I want to do" & I've been playing piano ever since. I started off learning everything from YouTube videos, just watching people play the parts I wanted to play & not really knowing how the parts were developed. Eventually, I got tired of doing it that way, & started learning some theory. Unlike a lot of folks I've met, I greatly enjoy theory & find it quite fascinating, so pretty quickly I began to really understand what was happening in the parts I was learning. Instead of seeing a run as a bunch of individual notes, I could recognize that "oh, he's just going down a couple octaves of the pentatonic blues scale there", for example. After I finish college, I plan to move to Nashville & try my hand at getting some session work or some audio jobs. If I find myself not getting enough work, I'll have that business degree to fall back on. I write a lot of music, & have some of my piano compositions on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. If you just look up my name, I'm the one with 5 instrumental tracks out. Anyways, all of that to say - hello!
  5. Mandatory mention of Emerson & Wakeman, though I really didn't fully discover them until after I already played. Unlike a lot of piano/keys guys I know, I didn't take piano lessons as a kid. Had no interest in playing music until a concussion took me out of high school sports. Needing something to do, & realizing most of my friends were musicians - I picked up bass. Now, being a Northwest Florida boy raised by folks who were in high school in the 70s, I'm a big Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. Because of picking up bass, I had started listening to music a lot more actively & really hearing what was going on in all the parts being played. So, for the first time, I really started to hear all of Billy Powell's great piano work. I thought to myself,"I wanna do that,"& the rest is history. At first I was learning from YouTube videos, then sheet music transcriptions (which can be quite horrible for trying to play boogie stuff like that) & then I eventually started to be able to pick it out by ear. Thanks to ol Billy, I can always instantly identify a chromatic sixth run, lol. Anyways, now that I've told a bit of my story - other players I greatly admire are Chuck Leavell, Bill Payne of Little Feat, Bill Evans, Albert Ammons, & Oscar Peterson.
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