Customer Reviews

Instant Scale and Chord Guide for Keyboards

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Excellent book for beginners through intermediate hobbyist. Unlike Macfarren and other Scale Manuals with 100+ pages of daunting scale exercises, this book graphically and clearly explains Circle of Keys and chord construction. Great little book to keep by piano and use as guide to scale warmup at beginning of practice!

Don't be fooled by the cover. This book should be given free with every keyboard. It has all the scales in easy format and the common chords. If you sit down for 3 hours a day for one month you can play almost any song from a fake book. Beware though, it has only major and minor scales. Don't expect to find Greek and Spanish scales. But for the price its great and compact too.

This book has a thorough listing of piano chords presented in a manner that makes it easy enough to reproduce them on your own keyboard.

The problem is the physical layout of the book: all the C# chords are on one page, for example; the F# on another, the A on another, the Bm on another, etc etc etc.

For a beginner to use the book to help them learn a simple song, they have to either flip pages mid-tune, make photocopies to lay side by side, or memorize the different chords before playing. That's fine in the long term, but I know my kids would have more fun learning if they could get to the piano before the studying gets too dull.

Still, a good tool.

I was somewhat disapppointed with this. It was not what I was expecting. I was hoping for a concise chord chart-I did not find this extremely helpful in returning me to my music.

It's a complete book of chords. I'll be using it forever and as long as I play piano I'll need it.

If you want to quickly learn to play the piano, watch Scott Houston
tv show on pbs "The Piano Guy". Well, this book is just as great
teaching you the chords and techniques too.

If you're already an experienced pianist, this is a book you don't need. If you are an absolute beginner, you don't need it either, but you will soon if you keep playing and progressing.

For anyone who aspires to be a casual piano player to entertain yourself, or a small group of friends or family, this book will help you out if you play like I do. I don't play at a high level, so the arrangements I choose are somewhat simple ones. The problem is that somewhat simple arrangements generally don't have enough music for the left hand to satisfy me on how a song should sound. So I play variations of the chords shown rather than the music written for the left hand in the arrangement. I also play some songs from Fake Books, which only show the treble clef and chord names, and expect you to use that to improvise the left hand.

The only gotcha in this style of play is that when chords come up that you don't know, and they will pretty frequently if you haven't drilled every chord into your head, you'll sometimes be scratching your head. That's where this book helps.

The first section of the book has scales to play for all keys. The second portion of the book has all the chords you are likely to come across, arranged by key. Not only does it show the bass and treble clef music for each chord, below that it has a keyboard diagram. I find this to be extremely useful for a quick look up when I'm learning a new song and up pops a chord that I'm unfamiliar with, or just don't see often enough to known it naturally.

If you can play a simple melody at approximately the correct tempo, and get the chords played correctly as you go, you can fool people into thinking that you're a great piano player even when you just barely understand what you're playing. LOL This book will help you get to that point.

Upon buying this book, I wanted to learn chords and scales so that I could begin to play improv piano. Unfortunately, the book was very simple. Each page is dedicated to one key (ie. C, C7, D, ect.) And really doesn't give any sense of how the chords work together. Currently, I'm still using it to memorize the chords and maybe in the long run it'll pay off, but it felt a bit too separated for me. As music seems to always work best when certain chords compliment each other, showing you a connection in your head has always been most successful at teaching me. This doesn't do that for me.

In conclusion, buy this book if you want a reference guide for finger placement for a chord you know.
Don't buy it if you are interested in learning chords for the first time.

Although I did not have too much time to pratice with it it seems to be a good reference for getting some acqaintment to the various chors and their combination you need to know to achieve nice "Voicings". A lot of work fir thos who really want it but this book helps.

This is a great book for popular piano. It explains all different kinds of chords without a bunch of difficult theory. If you just want to learn to play from a fake book, get this book and get going! If you want to be a classical pianist, better hire a piano teacher.