Musicals Books

A very good book for all ages who want to play an instrument. If only I would follow their advise. Maybe.... reads easy and flows well. I recommend it. Thumbs up, a must own for your library.

What a wonderful book for young students (and older students!) I teach private trumpet lessons to students ranging in age from 10 to 18 and they all enjoyed looking at it while waiting for their lesson to begin. Lots of great tips and like the title suggests a "Survival Guide".

BRAVO !!

This book is filled with practical easy to read information about what it means to learn music. As a music teacher, I find this book to be a great tool for parents and students. It teaches the basic aspects of what is involved in learning a musical instrument. It is also written on a level that schoolage students can understand. I found it to be simple to read, yet very informative and enjoyable. I am going to recomend it to my students - especially the Jr. High students who seem to have lost motivation. I may even assign them chapters to read and intergrate it into my lessons.

I just wanted to add my voice as an enthusiastic thumbs up for this book. I've been playing for 25 years. I own only about 10 woodshed/workbook-type books for guitar, and this is the one that I (1) use everytime I practice, and (2) found has a continuum of easy to darn-near-impossible techniques to work on. Mead writes with the simplicity and to-the-point clarity of a career guitar instructor. Where other books seem either too easy or devoid of stuff I can learn/work on (the books I thumbed through and never bought - heh), of the few I've purchased because they really contained quality stuff, this is the best of my ten. Why? The 10-minute exercises (5 a day, 2 minutes each - in graduating chapters according to difficulty) stretch you in ways you'd never thought of - and work both left-hand, right-hand, scales, rythym ... a complete little growth course. The additional information in the readable chapters is great (some I knew and some I didn't), and the CD's examples are illustrative - burn them to mp3 and use them in your iPod as you play through the book.

This book has such great advice for a beginning guitarist. I am new to guitar playing - well, I tried to learn 10 years ago and never got beyond the basic A/C/G chord shapes. Below are some of the gems I've discovered in this book:

1. Deal with fingering difficulties immediately, rather than ignoring them and hoping they'll get better as time goes by.

2. Practice my barre without chord shapes, once the barre is strong, then I can add the shapes. I can't tell you how discouraged I was by barre chords, and I think breaking them down like this would have helped me tremendously 10 years ago.

3. Exactly where my left fingers should be touching the strings - close to the frets, on the tips, not fleshy pads.

4. Break down songs into 4 bar segments, rather than try to plow through the whole thing at once, and be prepared to spend a long time learning a song.

5. How to set up an effective practice routine.

I guess these are pretty basic things a good guitar teacher would have taught me, but I had 3 guitar teachers (briefly, but still) in the late 1980s and still managed to miss these insights.

The book also has lots of information about chord arrangements and scales, and the importance of training your ear to recognize major & minor chords and the intervals that make up the major scale.

But my favorite part is the actual workout, which consists of 5 charts. Each chart has 5 exercises (warm-up, arpeggio, scale, chromatic exercise, harmonized scale) with 12 different levels. I am just a D+ on Chart 1, and I can already see the difference. There is a CD that contains the workouts, played at a slow tempo and a regular tempo.

Actually, I take that back. I think my favorite part about this book is how the author really addresses concerns and thoughts a beginning guitarist (like me!) has. He clearly has a lot of experience teaching, and it really shows.

I'm just not sure why this book is billed as a "fast track" to learning acoustic guitar, unless it is because most other tracks are filled with inefficiencies and bad habits that could hinder a budding guitarist. There is no shortcut to actually practicing your guitar, alot! I don't think you can just do this workout and expect yourself to learn to play guitar - you'll need to work on songs and practice every day. Well anyway, that's a small quibble, I paid full price for this book at my book store and it was well worth it.

I just bought this book for my mother-in-law because this was one of my favorite piano collections as a young pianist. I love the pieces (ALL of them!) because they're not too difficult to play, yet they sound beautiful and impressive. A MUST for every intermediate pianist!

Wow, this book is a treasure. I am taking lesson for 3 years and as an adult, my fall back is speed as I don't have flexible fingers like young kids. I have been doing Hanon trying to strengthen and to keep my fingers flexible, but I get so bored with the monotone. I still am at a beginner/intermediate level (4) and this book is just perfect to learn and practice. This book is definitely great until advanced level, as it will be so enjoyable to play and you will never get bored. All 25 pieces have beautiful melodies and so enjoyable to learn and most importantly...the speed. I listened to the CD and it helps so much to feel the speed; and with such lovely melodies, I could not get bored. This book is sooo worth it to have in your collection. I'm so glad I have it in my collection.
Play on :)

Jody Fisher is a good teacher. Patient, methodical, not assuming you already know things, he walks you through basics, from how to sit to how to hold each hand and finger and how to pick, and he provides and demonstrates exercises which have been very good practice for me in fundamental technique.

Like many older guys taking up guitar again, and having learned in a pretty casual manner, I am weak on fundamentals and have bad habits which impede my progress and even caused tendonitous in my left elbow - very painful, I don't recommend it! Jody is the man, I feel better and play better. Thanks, Jody!

THIS IS GOOD BOOK AND I RECOMMENED THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE. I HAVE PRACTICE THIS BOOK EVERY DAY. IT IS COOL AND HARD WORK AND VERY RELAXED WORKOUT. SOMEDAY SOMEONE WILL PLAY PRACTICES EVERYDAY HABIT.

The reason I like this book so well is because it has some great songs in it that was sang in the church choir I was in for years. They are beautiful songs.

This book has a great selection of hymns. If you are into gospel music, you'll find some real classics, from the old traditional songs to newer gospel music. The arrangements are quite simple, comparable to any hymnal I've ever played from, easily learned.

In my opinion, this is the finest chord book available. It has every imagineable chord in it, with several options usually, up and down the neck. A very useable help. You won't be disappointed!

i purchased this book in 1965 and have been using it regularly ever since. Fingerings are well-illustrated and easy to follow. Excellent for beginners and those more advanced. Love it!

This is one tremendous find! THe Gershwins wrote some very memorable tunes, and the piano arrangements (also includes vocals and guitar chords) are lush and exquisite! I have been looking for a book of Gershwin for piano awhile now and this is PERFECT! Lots of fun and pleasure, though it is not "EASY PIANO". Moderate ability is required, but you can always fake it by playing the chords and melody line. I love it!

I am not a musician and so I cannot comment on what is really the heart of this work, the sheet music, its arrangements etc.
I would however say that it is a pleasure to look at the lyrics of the great Gershwin songs. And it is too a great pleasure to hum in mind and heart the tunes which still keep a lot of people humming and hoping in the world.
The Gershwins were the greatest brother team music ever knew.
Ira later on worked with many other first- rate composers and was a master of writing lyrics.
But it is the great George Gershwin taken from us early whose music seems to define not simply a whole era of music, the hope of jazz, and classic combined in a new folk popular swinging
and refined elegance.
The American soul for all time.

If you want to stop throwing your money away on a twirpy little unhelpful, unprofessional, underfed, cocaine addicted swindler of a violin instructor who ruins your entire week in a mere half an hour and ghoulishly helps himself to your hard earned money just to pay for his own sicko addiction then this is the self-help, do-it-yourself manual you've dreamed of. This one book is pretty straight forward and has saved me hundreds of dollars on lessons. I don't even go to lessons anymore, I just teach myself and I've made great progress.

There's some pictures and diagrams as well in here to help you with fingering but be forewarned that the fingering suggested in this book might be a bit difficult for some. It all depends on how skinny (or how fat) your fingers are and how flexible those muscles inside your fingers are. If your fingers aren't that flexible try wrapping a tight rubber band around them and then trying to spread your fingers, sort of like a spider. After a week or two you'll notice a difference.

Also, for me at least it helps to use only my ring finger to play some notes (G on D string and D on A string) whereas this book suggests you use 3 (index, middle and ring). It just depends on what you're comfortable with, everyone is going to be different and some folks might enjoy the method this book gives the most. Just be aware that there are alot of different fingering techniques to use, not just the ones shown here.

Other than that this is definately self-explanitory enough for you to finish yourself without paying good money for an instructor. Good investment for anyone starting the violin.

hi there, my teacher is teaching my orchestra with all for strings i have complete book one and two this book rocks! i play viola * no really? * this is a great book it will teach you just what you need! i can't wait to finish book 3!

*/sj

This cello book 2 covers so much. It has an intense introduction of 2nd position on the cello, over 40 tunes including familiar fiddle tunes like Turkey in the Straw. Lots of preparation exercises (called warm-ups in the book), scales and arpeggios, triplet and 16th note rhythms, etc. As a beginner a year and a half ago, I never thought I'd be this advanced, but I owe it to this series of books. I am now in ABCs of Cello book 3, a real gem, but you have to follow the system and begin with book 1 of the series which I did.

Cello is the best!

I used to play cello in highschool and then dropped it completely for 20 years. I am finding these three, beginning, intermediate, & advanced books very useful.
The beggining book has a nice mixture of melodies and instructions, and I quickly got back up to speed. To get the most out of it, you really need to sit and read it as well, small phrases can be passed over that are very important, such as "try to think about the musical phrase while you play" is easy to overlook while practicing, but important to keep in mind.
Having played before I am finding myself flipping back and forth between books, but even the begginning book has some lovely pieces that with changes in emphasis or repeats become compelling pieces for performance.
I actually moved into book two before I was finished with book one completely, but I still go back into book one for refresher exercises. At least once a week I have a practice session where I go back to basic things to work on fine tuning technique, and this graduated system is very good for that.
Listening to good cellists and a teacher can help you with phrasing and musicality, but this book is very good on basic technical information with an ephasis on getting the finger placements correct and working each one.

I DON'T HAVE THIS & DO NOT GET INTO BOOKS BUT, BECAUSE THEY ARE MY FAVORITE BAND I'LL GIVE IT A 5 STAR rateing

Angus, Brian & and the boys from the DC have spent their careers hewing pure uncompromising rock from the Mountain from whence all rock doth spew. Toiling nonstop they form the rock into blistering music that is like a blunt mallet crashing into your girating skull. This book chronicals the long careers of the lads who feel just as comfortable rocking out as hanging about in the stroh with their mates. This book will assault you like taking dope,speed,coke, two shots of bourbon and afterword you will say right I'm ready.