A great package for the budding blues pianist
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This is an excellent value, well presented package, broken down into manageable chunks and the link between the CD and book is straightforward (much better than other book / CD sets I have) so you can hear what you should be playing, which is often an aid to learning in itself - especially when you're trying to get the timing and rhythm of a piece right.
One of the joys of blues piano is that it is accessible to new starters as even simple compositions can sound ... bluesy. However, you should know that you need to be able to read music to use this book - or at least be able to figure out the notes before playing them. Having seen learner books jam packed with notes for where your fingers should be, names of notes and key diagrams, I much prefer just to see the notation and go from there (and I've been learning for about 2 months).
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The only useful blues piano book
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I have, over time, bought quite a few blues piano books. Of course there is no substitute for learning to play stuff by ear but having said that (and for before you improve at that) this is the only really useful book i've come across.
It gives you a grasp of the theory and at the start that you don't realise it is as useful as it is until you have progressed slightly. It is the only book I come back to.
Oh and also, the stuff in this book actually sounds like the stuff you would want to play!
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There's fun here even for an absolute beginner. Recommended.
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I think as an absolute beginner on the piano it's great to have an "angle" or a way in, as it were, to the vast world of music. I've found that the blues is a good place to start, and from the off you can have fun with this book and CD, practising simple blues basslines. I'm notoriously fickle with my hobbies but this book has helped to keep me interested: nearly two years into my playing and I'm still bashing away, and thanks to this book I've even started doing different things simultaneously with my right and left hands, an incredible achievement for me!
This said, I'd advise absolute beginners not to be put off by the technical language about myxolidian scales etc which is all printed, page after page, right at the very start of the book. Don't worry about all this stuff, just get to the simple swinging basslines and use the CD and whatever music-reading skills you're developing to get you playing along, and stick with it, stick with it, stick with it.
Later there're all kinds of licks and flourishes to play with, which I'm looking forward to.
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From someone just starting to learn blues piano
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Good book, well explained. Good fun and some nice pieces at the end, just difficult enough to make it interesting.
I have other books in this series and found them all to be excellent. The CD is particularly appreciable: being able to put the tunes on my MP3 player and play along with them is a great help in getting it right. Of course no book is complete in itself, so you need lots of them, all overlapping. But this is a good one to start with.
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