Local piano teacher wins international music cover contest, catches eye of rock icon
By John Watson Local Journalism initiative Reporter
In the fall of 2021, David DeWolfe entered into the online contest hosted by Ultimate Guitar, normally an online resource for musicians maintained by its user community.
“Their catalogue has got to be millions of songs. Type in the name of any song and it comes up with the words and then the chords above it for how to play,” said DeWolfe.
Though the service is mostly used by guitar players, any instrumentalist can use it so long as they know how to play chords on their instrument.
The cover contest launched in October with four different categories, including electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocal cover and miscellaneous. DeWolfe said he was confident going into the miscellaneous category with his piano cover.
“As soon as I saw the best miscellaneous cover, I knew nobody was going to beat me,” said DeWolfe.
He performed covers of Feed My Frankenstein, Hey Stupid, Poison and Welcome to my Nightmare, among some other covers and uploaded the videos to the contest.
“Late October, I was hanging out at a buddy’s ranch and all of a sudden my phone started buzzing at me. I looked and it was Instagram. I don’t use Instagram very often … I thought ‘that’s weird’ so I looked and it said, ‘Alice Cooper has mentioned you in a post’,” said DeWolfe.
“Sure enough, Alice Cooper had shared my video and this was before the contest was over.”
The winners of the contest were announced at the end of November. DeWolfe said the response on social media was similar to that which Cooper generated.
“I was lying in bed one day and all of a sudden my social media started exploding and sure enough, they had announced that I won the miscellaneous category.”
“So that’s pretty cool, and Alice Cooper, he messaged me back and forth a couple times, he liked a couple of my other videos as well … that’s pretty exciting.”
More recently, DeWolfe added, while he was performing on Instagram, he received a notification that the Baha Men had shared his cover of their 2000 hit, Who Let the Dogs Out.
The increase in exposure has been nothing short of a boon for the piano teacher, who at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, took a huge hit to his business.
“I’ve had over 100 requests for piano lessons in the last two weeks. Basically, since Christmas, my inbox keeps filling up,” said DeWolfe.
At the start of the pandemic, DeWolfe went from having 57 active piano students down to 12 within a short time frame. Now, with the influx of requests for instruction, he is excited about the opportunity for his business.
Though he would be excited to get an opening gig on a tour, he does not expect live music opportunities to occur within the near future.