Customer Reviews

Steely Dan - Just the Riffs for Piano

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

 

 

This book is simply "just the riffs" to Steely Dan songs... You will NOT find full length songs in here at all. This book is mainly for those who already know the songs (like from the Steely Dan pop books arranged by Hal Leonard) and want to piece together the rest of the song to make it sound more like the actual recording... I play a lot of Steely Dan covers and obviously the arranged sheet music books they have in stores aren't really that accurate... The riffs that I couldn't sound out from the record or that didn't come with the "other" Dan books of arranged sheet music were in here.

If you happen to have a Hammond B3 organ...and a band... BUY THIS BOOK! Because they have the Do It Again solo written out for you, finally transcribed! And it's dead on accurate. And sounds awsome...

Also, they have the Black Cow instrumental that DIDN'T come with the original Hal Leonard arranged sheet music. It even contains the wickedly cool, impressive piano solo of Sign In Stranger from the Royal Scam album.

And a few songs from Two Against Nature which I thought was cool.

Another point to make would be that for some of these songs, you would HAVE to have a band playing in back of you OR (if you were to play solo somehow) you would have to somehow compensate for the missing bass notes.

For example, the solo for Sign In Stranger may sound really cool and fun to play but when you look at it, a lot of the chords are jazz voicings without the bass or root notes so the solo WILL in fact sound empty if playing it on your own. Same goes with the Black Cow solo, but you can make something up for the left hand because all they give you is the right hand (with the chords)...

I was also verry happy to finally have the Your Gold Teeth II introduction and the tone cluster riffs from I Got The News...

All in all, a very helpful book if you're trying to get exact riffs... or trying to play their songs in general... The reason why my review looks like a J.K. Rowling novel is because I'm so fed up with buying random books on Amazon and having no idea what they're like, I bet many can relate... So I thought I'd take the stand and tell it like it is... Cheers.

The solo transcriptions in this book are brilliant! It's like being given Steely Dan's top secret "playbook" for several of their hit songs.

I've been playing Steely Dan tunes on piano since I was in junior high (way back when, in '77), and even though I have a pretty good ear, I don't have a strong jazz background so I could never get Donald Fagen's chord voicings quite right. And all of the Steely Dan songbooks that I have are very crude approximations of what's really being played on the original recordings. This book has "filled in the gaps" for many of my favorite 'Dan tunes.

My favorites from this book are "I Got the News", the solo section of "Time Out of Mind", and the 'plastic organ' solo from "Do It Again" -- songs that I could only approximate, until now.

Now this is a handy, little book. Showing you how to play some of the most definitive Steely Dan riffs for the piano, Rhodes, Clavinet &c., it contains extracts from Can't Buy A Thrill all the way through Two Against Nature.
All parts are accompanied by the author's comments, and give insightful information about the techniques and contents of each riff.

However, the book lacks the "final touch" that would make it worthy of 5 stars:
There's an error in the printing that makes a specific line on every page look "inflated".
Although the transcriptions generally are accurate and clear, there are some silly, obvious mistakes in accidentals, e.g. in "I Got The News" and "Babylon Sisters".
Besides, the author attributes all the riffs to Donald Fagen, however the majority was done by other studio musicians.

Overall, though, it's a nifty collection and it will definitely help you play the most definitive Dan riffs, should you be unable to or unwilling to learn to play them by ear.

Buyers should be aware that due to its release in 2001, it does not cover Everything Must Go.

This is indeed a handy little book, and it is what it is advertised to be, which is always refreshing these days. Like the reviewer from Norway, though, I was bothered that the author pretended (or did he really believe?) that all of these cool riffs were the work of Donald Fagen. And while I'm not sure that our friend from Norway was right that "most" of these riffs were supplied by studio musicians, certainly many of them were. It seems like a dirty trick not to give Victor Feldman (to give just one example) credit for his brilliant piano work on "I Got the News." If I were Donald Fagen, I would be embarrassed about this and feel compelled to make a public statement giving credit where it's due.

I am a beginning piano player, and I own all the SD songbooks. They are such crap. This book has a lot of the "flavor" that makes you go, "Hey! That sounds like the song!". I'm still trying to figure out "Home At Last". The piano intro is da bom! Perhaps when I am a better player, I will make my own arrangments of the songs. But it would be nice to just "plunk plunk" my way through those SD chestnuts. I wonder why just the riffs, and not the full versions of the songs?