To The Edge – piano and poetry improvisations

These times may take us to the edge of hope. Let’s go there and keep going.

I didn’t expect to release this. Especially now. Though now is all there is.

“To The Edge“. For now, these six improvised piano-plus pieces are in limited release. Reach out to me if you think these should be on all the music streaming platforms.

Meanwhile, here are the two poems that I improvised to accompany this suite of music.

To The Edge

faculty stability
mine
yours
ours

not so straightforward
as
we
thought

now unnecessary insanity
creeps
down
down

suddenly realizing gone
to
the
edge

~ poem is improvised (spontaneous, unedited) by Stan Stewart and
~ Copyright © 2025 by Stan Stewart and muz4now, inc. All rights reserved.

Phased Out

anxiety producing 
errands
error ands
unfinished strands

this is much more
than a feeling

nothing about it
is grandiose

the powerful
mock us
with their
phasing

out the door
we are
rising

~ poem is improvised (spontaneous, unedited) by Stan Stewart and
~ Copyright © 2025 by Stan Stewart and muz4now, inc. All rights reserved.

Music GearSquad info

When Westwood Instruments released “Alt Grand”, I wasn’t going to license it. However, my friend John Davis recommended it. So, I downloaded it and checked out this extended piano instrument.

I picked this up today and I have to say it’s definitely one of the more characterful and interesting piano libraries I’ve used. Lots of sound design opportunities plus the standard piano and felt piano are gorgeous while still feeling unique.www.westwoodinstruments.com/instruments/…

[image or embed]

— John M Davis (@jdsampo.bsky.social) April 26, 2025 at 8:57 PM

As I dug into this “Alt” (alternative and altered) instrument, I quickly found that the pristine piano samples were quite interesting. Quirky and not quite perfect. But more interesting were the mangled piano sounds. Using everything from glitch to granular, Westwood had created a variety of “textures” to stand on their own or be mixed with the authentic piano sounds.

Within minutes, I had a few of my own patches created. So the next step was to improvise. Sure enough, the results are six new tracks of piano-plus improvisations.

More geeky stuff

There were three tracks where I wanted a little more augmentation of the piano sounds. The perfect instrument for this was Arturia’s Augmented Grand Piano. I had barely touched this instrument since it became part of their collection.

Once again, it only took a few minutes to build patches that fit the mood of what I wanted to create. In fact, the last track — “Grand Phased Out” — is made with a single custom patch from Augmented Grand. Thanks to Westwood and Arturia for these inspiring instruments!