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95 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Blues book for intermediate players, September 26, 2004
This review is from: Blues Piano: Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series (Keyboard Instruction) (Paperback)
I got this book along with a number of other blues books, and this one has been my favorite. It doesn't contain as much material as the multivolume Alfred series, but I find the organization, presentation, and *especially* the examples to be superior in Mark's work. The way the examples build section by section and chapter by chapter is exquisite. They are musically interesting yet very focused on the point at hand--I always enjoyed playing through the examples, but was never confused by unnecessary complications.
The companion CD is the best I've seen in any music instruction book, ever. Most examples have the left and right hand parts on the left and right channels, so you can mute one speaker or the other for "hands seperate" practicing. I personally don't use this much, as I prefer to work it out with the metronome, but I'm glad it's there and you may appreciate it. On tracks that have a backing band, the band is on one side and the keyboard on the other so you can play along to just the band. Finally, the "complete" examples at the end of the book feature a "slow" and "fast" version on the CD. One nitpick: I wish he'd included (in the text) the metronome settings he used, making it easier to practice/jam without the CD.
I've got several of the Hal Leonard books in this series, and they're not all by Mark Harrison. His books are definitely a cut above. All in all, if you have any interest in the subject whatsoever, you can't go wrong with this book.
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43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very comprehensive and easy to understand, September 17, 2006
This review is from: Blues Piano: Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series (Keyboard Instruction) (Paperback)
Having a good musical ear, yet with very weak sight reading skills, I'm always searching for good books that can teach common blues licks/runs on the piano, while also explaining the "why" of how it works. This book is perfect. It can be used for a variety of things to learn:
--Licks/runs...there are hundreds of examples of great sounding, commonly used runs (as opposed to other books, whose runs can sound very un-creative or cheesy). Each run is usually only a few measures long, easy to pick up, and the book teaches you a great deal of different sounding ones in all the various styles of blues (boogie woogie, n. orleans, funky, jazzy, gospel, etc).
--Left hand bass...while only a few pages long, this section is flawlessly explained in a clear, straightforward manner. Harrison covers about 15 major (and fairly easy to pick up) left hand bass teqniques covering all the major blues styles. While it took a lot of practice to get all of them down pat, they have increased my playing monumentally. He also teaches you to always be mixing them to have variation in your bass.
--The "By Ear" element...unlike MANY other books, Mark Harrison's included CD is a god send. If you're like me and suck at sight reading, this cd is a blessing. The examples are short enough that once you can pick out the general notes, all you have to do is pop in the cd and hear clearly played note for note examples of what is on the page. I've found that hearing it cements the sound and timing of it in my head, making it easier to play, and also allows you to tinker and improv off the examples he gives you.
--Great summation and lead from basic to complex...the book incorporates more and more licks as it goes on, and covers more and more styles. By the end, when your listening to full 2-3 page blues pieces (the cd gives two tracks each for these; slow solo piano, and a faster one with a backing band), you can really get a feel for how all these runs are simply tools at your disposal to fit any given blues progression. Also great is that Harrison doesn't teach the very beginning licks as forgettable "step 1" sounding fodder...the licks sound great from the beginning by themselves, but are also used as building blocks to form more complex runs and comping later on.
This book is an absolute treasure trove of blues ideas, and a huge reason for my playing having increased so much over the past year. Mark Harrison's Smooth Jazz book is also good (it has a lot of great explanations for jazz chord voicings) but this book, and his "Jazz-Blues" book, are the two to go out and get immediately if you want concrete results without having the theory bog you down.
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous, February 15, 2007
This review is from: Blues Piano: Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series (Keyboard Instruction) (Paperback)
I'm a blues guitarist and I'm in the early stages of learning to play piano, so I can't give the most credible of reviews of this book yet, but I can tell you that it's chock-full of really, really, REALLY excellent comps and vamps and licks. So far I'm only able to work on the simplest of the stuff early in the book, but I've listened to the CD the whole way through, and it's just one example after another after another of killer riffs, the kind of stuff that makes me think, "YES...that is what I want to be able to play." In all kinds of blues styles.
This is definitely *not* a beginner book. As I said, most of it is still way beyond me. It's not a "here's what the half-rest looks like" kind of book, nor will you find guides for fingering. One of the first signs that told me that this book is still over my head is that it shows chords like, say, a 9th chord, with all five notes shown, in a key where it appears to me that there's no possible way one hand can hit all of those notes. Does the experienced player just hit a broken chord? Is it supposed to be a two-handed chord, even though it's shown in the bass clef, and there are also notes in the treble clef? I don't know.
So this is a book for people who already have some piano playing ability. But the material is terrific, and there's a ton of it. If I can ever learn to play all, or even half, of the stuff in this book, I'll be a happy man.
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