Customer Reviews

The Rhythm Bible (Book & CD)

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

 

 

This is a pretty fun rhythm book. Before I purchased this book, I was searching around for a book to improve on rhythmic skills. This is a good book to start off.

I need to mention that the accompanying CD don't come with the full track of every single rhythm presented in the book, but on every first rhythm pattern on every page.

I would definitely encourage music lovers, be it pianist, drummer, guitarist, etc..to purchase this book as it will definitely will improve your rhythm reading.

This book is for beginners till advance players. So, it's really a book worth keeping in your shelves !!

My absolute favorite of rhythm resource book. I even let my piano students use it whenever they are improvising or composing a new piece. This book can be used by beginner, intermediate, advanced or professional musician.

An excellent book w/CD. Learn what rhythms are all about with plenty of practice riffs. Highly recommended.

The Rhythm Bible (Book & CD)

I just recently ordered the Rhythm Bible from the U.S. I live in Ontario, so was very surprised at how fast I received my order. I only had one little problem with this book and that was the binding. Some pages were loose so I took it to Staples and had it wire bound for 5.00. Now it lies flat when open. I highly recommend purchasing this book as it is more of an investment and well worth it. It comes with a CD, which is very helpful in detecting the differences in the rhythms, particulary in the 8ths, syncopation, etc. I would suggest you have it wirebounded as it will then lie flat and be much easier to use.

All in all, I feel I made a good investment by purchasing this book, even with the extra 5.00 cost to have it wire bound. In fact, I have since had other music books wire bounded so they will lie flat and stay open.

A. Law

This book has over 1000 exercises. The idea is to practice them all until you become fluent in reading and counting rhythms which would be a benefit to any musician. What hasn't been mentioned in the reviews above is that these are not dry, mechanical exercises. So far every exercise I have played is a fun new rhythm! I play a hand drum and I find this text to be a rich resource in rhythmic ideas as well as valuable technical exercises.

The text is very systematic. Working through rhythms in quarter,eighth, sixteenth notes etc. It spends a significant amount of time on triplets. Most of the book is devoted to a thorough examination of syncopation.

The book is almost entirely devoted to 4/4 rhythms. A few pages at the end cover odd time rhythms but it's no more than an introduction.

While the author does explain some of the finer points of music notation such as dotted notes, he does not provide an introduction to reading music and you will need a basic knowledge of Western music or percussion notation to use this book. Personaly I am used to a percussion notation scheme that is used for Middle Eastern drumming but it wasn't too difficult to pick up classical western notation.

The CD only contains the first track from each group of 10 exercises. I suggest using a rhythm generator program like Rhythm Rascal or Percussion Studio and entering the tracks into the software so you can play them.

My one complaint, like others here, is that binding is not high quality. This is not a read once and discard text. It's a book one uses for a lifetime. If I can find it in hard cover I will definitely buy it. I would have knocked off one star for the binding but the text itself is so good it gets five stars anyway

If you're interested in working on your sight reading, or just to better understand rhythm, then this book is for you. The audio CD has recorded samples of most of the exercises. The book starts you off at the novice level and progresses naturally into more complicated material. If a person started at the beginning of this book and mastered the entire book they would improve by many degrees.

I've been working on the exercises and they're so helpful.

But the pages started to immediately fall off, so I had to staple them together (luckily I have one of those big staplers that can staple a book like this with this many pages)

my music teacher uses this book in her theory classes. I found it on Amazon. It is easy to understand and great for singers and musicians.

I have both versions of the book:

On the Print edition (5 stars):
Everyone usually recommends Modern Reading Text in 4/4 For All Instruments for learning to read rhythms. I have that book too, but this book is better because it comes with a CD that demonstrates some of the exercises in straight and swing time. I also like the fact that it has a bit more explanatory text and uses slightly more contemporary songs (for example, it will say something like: this rhythm is similar to the one used in Led Zeppelin's Kashmir)

On the Kindle edition (2 stars):
- You don't get the CD.

- The exercises are scanned images, so it doesn't scale well. I got this to use while traveling. Each page of this book has about 10 rhythm exercises. Unfortunately, Amazon has scanned this in a way where sometimes each exercise is an image, and sometimes all 10 exercises are an image. In practice, the images don't look very good on a Kindle (I have a 4th generation basic version). The notes are pretty small and the notes appear more like grayscale than like a dark black color. You can sort of rotate the image to make it bigger sometimes. I'm a little disappointed in the quality of the transfer.

I also can read this book on my smartphone, which is slightly better, because it supports zooming. However, the Kindle app has a few bugs - if you want to zoom in on a page that has two images, it will always only zoom in on the first image and not the second. You can get around this by rotating your phone and putting it into landscape mode, which usually, but not always, leave only one image on the screen. Then you can zoom in and use pinch to zoom to really see the images.