Customer Reviews

Playing the Recorder - Alto

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

 

 

This is a good method book for the Alto recorder. It has a large assortment of music from many periods and teaches some of the fundamentals of music theory well. My only gripe was that even in the beginning most of the music was unfamiliar, which made it harder for me to learn to read music. Also, the fingering guide is interspersed throughout the book and there is no one chart to which I could refer. I suppose that it is easy enough to print a chart out on the internet, but including a fingering chart would have been nice.

I have been playing soprano/tenor recorder for awhile now, and decided it was time to learn the alto. I searched through just about all of Amazon's instructional books for the alto recorder, and bought anything that was rated decently. This book is good (alto books are kind of hard to find - most books are for the soprano), but I prefer one of the other books I bought from Amazon at the same time - The Recorder Guide by Kulbach and Nitka. It teaches both soprano and alto at the same time, which makes it a double value for your money. However, of the four alto books I bought, this takes a very close second place to The Recorder Guide, and there is no harm in having both.

This book serves the need of an adult learning music very well. It not only teaches the recorder, but also the basics of music theory. This is necessary because many scores need to be transposed to play easily on a recorder. But what I like most is how they emphasize ear training and developing your own melodies as well.

Many recorder books have stodgy melodies and Germanic folk songs with which I feel no personal connection. This one has melodies that appeal to me because they help me play some of my favorite classical melodies.

I'm also getting the soprano book to teach my kids. Everything I say here goes equally well for the soprano recorder text.

Sadly this book is too scant on direction of how to play. Additionally since none of the songs are familiar ones, I can't tell if I am playing them correctly.

This publication is one dull, boring book. It lacks much direction, the selections are short, and it seems to have no underlying contextual concept. In its favor, it is one of the very few Tenor Recorder books out there but it's disappointing.

As other reviewers have noted, the fingerings are introduced one or two at a time, but there is no comprehensive chart, or is the scale fingering for each key given. The selections are those loved by elementary school music teachers everywhere -- Latvian folk tunes, snatches of classical compositions, and unlabeled melodies whose claim to fame is the they only require three note. I recall my frustration in seventh grade that I'd never heard any of the melodies before -- or after.

On the plus side, some instruction on transposing is given, although it could be presented a little clearer. With an alto recorder, you will be doing a lot of transposing.

I was lookink for a book I could teach my daughter about the alto recorder. I found this one a good deal, and I bought this one between others