My Musical Journey

(March, 2007) I was born in 1940 in Belleville, Illinois but grew up and attended school in St. Louis, Mo. I took piano and voice lessons from the age of 10 and by the age of 15 was singing and playing piano gigs around St. Louis. After high school, I reported for military duty and was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas where I met my lovely bride of 44 years and became a permanent "Texan."

I attended North Texas State University as a music education major with a concentration in percussion - didn't play piano well enough to be a piano major. I played in the lab band program, the concert band, the orchestra, and various ensembles. It was a great experience because a lot of the guys in the music school either were playing or had played with people like Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Blood Sweat and Tears, Woody Herman, many other lesser-known groups. My best friend from college became the first chair clarinetist with the San Francisco Symphony - stayed there for over 30 years before he passed. Another friend went on to play trumpet with Doc and the Tonight Show Band. So I had the good fortune to learn from a lot of really outstanding players. Just wish I could play like them.

During my college years, I played drums with various bands in the Dallas area. In 1975 I walked away from it all. I was lucky to have played everything from jazz trio work to 18 piece big band gigs including short times with both the Dallas and Fort Worth Symphonies.

Somehow I ended up with a M.Ed. in elementary education and started my career teaching 6th grade, which I did for 10 years. I left teaching to become a programmer - didn't last very long - frankly, I was pretty bad at it. But that led to some good things because I was hired to implement a technology program for one of the best school districts in the Dallas area. I eventually ended up teaching very expensive Novell Networking and Cisco Router classes to adults until I retired about 9 years ago.

So how did I become interested in a PSR3000? Well, my wife and I were on a cruise last March and there was a guy playing a Kurtzwiel PA88. I was totally blown away by all the sounds he was producing. When I got home I started looking at music stores and playing around with all the various keyboards they had on the floor. I brought home a Tyros 1 - it didn't seem to play like the book said, then I brought home a Motif ES 7 - it lasted 3 days - too much to figure out - finally I brought home my PSR3000 - I knew it was the one the moment I started playing on it.

Until I started looking at keyboards in March of 2006, I had not played a single note of music since 1975. It has been a very refreshing and humiliating experience trying to regain my music skills at the keyboard after all those years. Special thanks go out to all the members of the PSR Tutorial forum - without your help I would probably have returned the keyboard and missed out on a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy my music - it represents songs that have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember - many have very special meaning. Thanks for listening.

-- 'Deane' Peters -- "Hammer"

Note: in October, 2010, Hammer moved up to the new Tyros4. In October 2017, Hammer moved to the Genos.

Hammer's MIDI Song Index

Hammer has provided 70 songs in midi format. These were created on the PSR-3000 (3k) or the PSR-S910 (91). Individual songs are shown in the table below and any one song can be downloaded by right-clicking on the song link. You can download all of Hammer's MIDI songs here: HM-3k-91.zip. The table displays the song title, tempo (T), time signature (TS), lyrics (L), chords (C), where possible, the style used, the original volume (V), and the keyboard used (K).