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| The Piano Handbook: A Complete Guide for Mastering Piano | 
 enlarge | Author: Carl Humphries
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $18.70
You Save: $11.25 (38%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $17.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (56 reviews)
Sales Rank: 3602
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Spiral-bound
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 290
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 11 x 9.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0879307277
Dewey Decimal Number: 786
EAN: 9780879307271
ASIN: 0879307277
Publication Date: December 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
With clear and easy-to-understand exercises, The Piano Handbook is perfect for anyone interested in learning the piano or improving their skills. It provides fresh material and techniques in styles ranging from classical to jazz, rock, bebop and fusion, and gives new players everything they need to learn and enjoy the piano. This book's innovative tutorial approach covers classical and contemporary music styles in an integrated way, and the companion CD brings the playing techniques and concepts to life. A full-color photo gallery illustrates the history of the piano and its essential recordings. This hardcover, deluxe edition also features semi-concealed spiral binding so the book stays open on the piano. The Piano Handbook prepares you not just to play, but to perform - and not just as a pianist, but as a complete musician.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 51 more reviews...
 previous piano experience required! August 22, 2008
This should be called the "piano review" workbook. The problem with experienced teachers and authors is they don't understand the mind of the beginner. They assume we already know things, or gloss over important details, or leave them out all together.
I think the author should have spend more time proofing the materials being taught, rather than babbling on with history lessons about people that have no relevance to the topics and techniques being taught.
The total glossing over the major and minor scales is horrible. To many "see if you can figure out...." without any followup explanation to check our work. To many new concepts found in the musical examples with no explanations as to their meanings.
This is not a book for beginners. It is good for picking up a tip here and there if you already have experience.
Very disappointed.
 Good book, but not for Absolutly Beginner August 5, 2008
This book offers a lot of value over the price, rich in information and quality of the cover and paper is so excellent. But most of the exercises are too difficult for the beginner. So I recommend to buy other books with more easier exercises or you'll give up playing piano... Anyway, recommend for buying this at least one at your shelf.
 Excellent teaching tool July 16, 2008
This is a great book to learn from as an adult beginner. As a voice and piano teacher I run across a lot of different teaching materials. This book holds the interest of the piano student.
For Voice Check out:
Vocalize!
 Cognitive Dissonance June 29, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book's ambitions are tremendous within a single volume; perhaps that is the reason why it fails so monstrously. With the aim of giving the player footholds in classical, jazz, bebop, fusion and experimental music along with instruction in music theory, history and development of the modern piano dovetailed with biographies of immortal figureheads of music within the bound of 290 pages, each page is about another twenty laps around the track. What's worse is that in order to maintain its pace, the author must sacrifice valuable practice exercises designed not only to strengthen and improve performance and flexibility, but to give the player some confidence, especially for a beginner.
We are not all music prodigies, nor are we actors in a musical in which everything magically falls into place the second or third time after first becoming acquainted with the move. The book does come with a CD of how the music should sound. However, the paradigm moves as such a quick pace as to make the aspirant not only confused, but cringe at the height of the new summit of work to be called at least fairly performed.
To the beginning student, I would recommend this book only as a supplement beside a far more general piano book to serve as a test for particular skills and challenging music. For the more advanced student, still, I would urge him not to buy this since it mixes very general terms and skills with incongruous and brief music: it would be better to find a book that matched both musical difficulty with learned information.
Great for my purpose June 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am a professional pianist who wanted to get out of some bad habits.
Mr Humphrie's book takes you back to the beginning so you can undo bad habits and weaknesses you did not even know you had.
The CD is a marvellous drilling tool.
Set your CD player on repeat and you can drill until you get the the exercise right.
Yes,he progesses rapidly but if you are determined and dead serious about becoming as good as you can be,this book may be for you.
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