The Complete Idiot's Guide to Playing Piano

by Brad Hill

Whether you are an aspiring concert pianist or just want to play keyboards in your own band, The Complete Idiot's Guide(R) to Playing Piano and Electronic Keyboards, Second Edition will give you just what you need to know. From reading music and learning chords, to understanding music notation or buying an instrument, expert author Brad Hill tells gets you started. With more music and expanded practice sessions, the new edition of this already popular book will be a necessity for the beginner. Learn posture, positionings, fingerings, notations, drills, and advice from the masters. Also, learn how to fake your way through accompaniment, stay motivated to practice and advance to the intermediate level.

Genres: Reference, Music

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Sonja Arlow · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

So, after 30 years I have finally started my piano training again. I am honest enough with myself to know I have very very little talent but the process of learning this instrument gives me endless joy.

The book follows the signature Idiots guide recipe of presenting the content in an easy to follow format with footnotes, anecdotes and quick recaps. This book cannot be used as a standalone but for a beginner adult student this is a great reference book that helped me understand concepts that I had forgotten (or was never really taught). Some of the humor was a little too juvenile for me but it got the message across.

After finishing please don’t think you will be able to pickup any piece of sheet music and let fly on the keys but you will walk away with a much better understanding of all the important areas of music theory and concepts that you should explore with a tutor.

And as a side note, learning to sight read is a whole different game these days with the help of technology. I downloaded an app that helps with the memorising of notes and it’s become quite frustrating addictive.

[Silas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am in a somewhat unusual situation as a guitarist learning to play the piano and other keyboard instruments (I'm actually more interested in synthesizers and organs than pianos, but I need to start somewhere). I have had this book for a long time before making any effort to read it. What makes me unusual is that I have a very rudimentary ability to read music from piano and guitar lessons in my youth, but a really rather extensive knowledge of music theory that is somehow removed from reading music. Because of that knowledge, the entire first half of the book was incredibly tedious, and with very basic musical ideas covered in very long sections with occasional bad jokes. If you have no previous knowledge of music (like, the kind I acquired in second or third grade music class), that will help you out. For me, it felt like it took a hundred pages to cover what it could have done in one or two. Still, I was making an effort to work through it, and played through the incredibly tedious and uninspiring examples in the hopes that it would help me to develop the association between the keys to which I already knew the notes and where those notes appear on the staff, which is what I am lacking. When the book finally got underway (around when the bass clef was introduced, which I am even worse at, because I quit childhood piano lessons before we got to it, and my guitar tutelage, such as it is, didn't cover it), it was a little bit more engaging, but the examples frequently were not the songs the text mentioned, and simple tunes like "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" were written wrong. I would double check that I had read it wrong, but it would just not be how I remember it, which was not a great experience, nor great at instilling confidence. I muddled through until the end of the bass clef chapter, and then into the "Putting it All Together" chapter, which was challenging at my level of reading ability. The chapter after that took a tremendous leap in difficulty, which stayed for a couple of chapters, and I was not able to follow very well then, but then curiously, the examples were easy again for a while before introducing classical music that was well beyond my ability to sight read. I could have spent the time to work on each piece, but it really wasn't set up very well, as the difficulties were all over the place, instead of graduated, and pieces were generally short and not particularly enjoyable to play. After the classical section, there was a bit about playing from fake books and playing chords that I knew pretty well already, and then sections about buying pianos, home keyboards, or synthesizers. I'm sure much of the piano information still holds up, but the parts about keyboards were very dated at over 20 years old on the edition I had (perhaps newer editions have improved many of these things, but I'm not eager to seek them out to find out). The author also clearly has a bias towards acoustic pianos and against electronic keyboards, despite some time spent going over auto-accompaniment features. Still, this was a book about playing pianos, and not any and all keyboard instruments, so I can set aside my differing opinion on that. While I do feel like I gained a little bit of experience in reading music from going through this for the bulk of its time, I also felt like it was not the best way to get started, and that a more focused piano method would be more beneficial, and might be better tailored to learning either as a child or as an adult, instead of this. I have often found Idiot's and Dummies books helpful for beginning to learn a new skill or topic, but this one was a bit less useful than other ones I have used, even compared to other ones I have read with a similar amount of foreknowledge.

[Phuoc Truong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Đây là cuốn khá hay cho người mới tìm hiểu về piano như mình. Cuốn này mình đọc gần xong phải trả thư viện vì để lâu quá và dịch covid-19.

[Herman · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, I'm done with this. That was the easy part. Now it's practice, practice, practice.

[Mercy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Super unhelpful all around would not recommend. There are better free courses on YouTube.