My Youtube channel - Matt Carter
Watch and hear wedding and event pianist Matt Carter on Youtube.
event pianist, matt carter, down hall, the ritz, madingley hall, thurston grange, suffolk wedding pianist, cambridge pianist
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My Youtube channel

Matt at Ritz

My Youtube channel

Suffolk pianist on Youtube

Back at the start of 2007, when Youtube was only a couple of years old, I took my first steps towards becoming a professional pianist. I was holding down a full-time sales and marketing job and had been in several bands playing the piano and keyboard. My job from Monday to Friday was to talk to people about plant seeds and gardening tools. It was OK, I thought, but I longed to work for myself doing a job that I loved.

In the evenings and weekends I learnt how to create a website. Originally I wanted to be know as the Suffolk Pianist, but needed a more generic website name. Covering the whole of the UK, I settled on the name Event Pianist. I made a very basic site and published it and was pleased with it. I now had an online presence without having to shell out thousands for someone else to do it for me.

Then one evening, not too longer after my Event Pianist site had gone live, I got a call from the manager of The Grange Hotel at Thurston in Suffolk who wanted me to play for a Valentine’s Day dinner. He booked me on the spot. Once he’d heard me play, he then went on to book me for two other dinners the following month.

I was up and running! That year I played for 27 events which were a mixture of corporate bookings and weddings in Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Cambridge and Bedford. But all throughout the year it had been nagging at me that I needed a way for people to see me play. I needed my own Youtube channel!

The leap forward

So finally, in January 2009, I sat down with my Camcorder and a digital piano and recorded four songs. Creep by Radiohead, a jazz standard called Autumn Leaves, He Sleeps from the film Pretty Woman, and Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. You can check them out – along with more professional-looking videos on my revamped Youtube channel – by clicking on the photo below….

Matt at Ritz

I published those four songs and was really pleased with the feedback I received from brides, grooms and event organisers. All told me that having videos to watch helped them choose to book me.

More and more bookings were coming in and I finally left my full-time job. I soon began getting frequent recommendations from local venue such as Hengrave Hall and Ickworth House, both near Bury St Edmunds, The Assembly House in Norwich and Bedford Lodge in Newmarket. I was also in demand a lot as a Cambridge pianist.

In the years since, I’ve gone on to record lots of videos. Many have been put onto Facebook. Some have been deleted. Until two weeks ago though, these four videos were all that existed on my Youtube channel.

I’ll admit that I’ve neglected my channel. A lot. But now I’ve given it a revamp and added lots more videos. Some at The Ritz, some at Madingley Hall, Down Hall….and I’ll be recording some new covers in my studio soon too!

I’d love you to take a look, have a listen, leave a comment or two and subscribe. You can also see many of my Youtube videos here.

See you there! 🙂

Matt