Piano by ear - 10/10

Verdict:

Full of really great insight to help any level of musician to improve their improvising skills and train their ear. Great practice for training your ear and playing skills

Pros

Really nice binding
Nice quality paper
Easy to read layout
Incredibly useful

Cons

A little hard to digest the information
Confusing to begin with

Key features

Review price: £10 ($14)

Released: July 2015

Shortlisted for the best print resource at the 2016 music teacher awards

For all levels of playing

Written by Lucinda Jane Mackworth-Young

Prior knowledge of theory required

Ratings:

Binding: 10/10

Length: 10/10

Ease to understand: 9/10

Brand: 10/10

Musical material: 10/10

Price: 9/10

OVERALL: 10/10

Book binding

The binding for this book is definitely one of the most practical and efficient ways of putting the pages together. It looks great and it functions really well. It is spiral bound in the middle but also the spiral is covered by the cover which I find useful for protecting it. Overall, I love the binding and I have found it way better than any other type of binding used in the past. It keeps the pages together, it’s easy to turn and it looks great.

Length

In total, it is 128 pages long. Within all of those pages, there is enough information to keep anyone occupied for weeks. The reason it is so long is because in each chapter she goes through a different key but she does not cover every single one. If you follow what she says for one key, it becomes relevant for another. For me, the book length was definitely enough for the price paid.

Understand the content

Reading through the book and understanding it are two completely different things. Obviously Lucinda knows her stuff well. A lot of the information is very advanced and so it is not for the faint hearted. It can be a bit heavy to take in sometimes but really you can just read what you find the most relevant. On each page, she has a grey box at the top with writing in it explaining how to do each technique while she has music or lyrics below to follow or read from. For that reason, you would want to have prior theory experience and be able to sight read pretty confidently. Although if you are a beginner, it is not impossible to learn each part but it will just be slower.

Price

The cost for this book is not high at all when you consider the amount of pages and work that went into creating it. It is a very detailed and in-depth book with so much information. A lot of expertise can be found in it and it is invaluable to any musician. I found 10£ to be very reasonable and I would be more than happy to pay that price for it again. The price should not be an issue here.

Musical material

While this book isn’t just scores with everything written in, it is crafted extremely well inserting what is necessary for the music and leaving certain parts to improvise yourself. For the music and chords which are written, they are very musical and have great character. Although for most of the book, she uses well-known pieces which she didn’t write but that is just to help the reader to improvise on a melody which is already known.

Overall verdict

This book has been a joy to spend time with and learn from. There is so much insightful information in the book and it is easy to just do the parts you are interested in. I like the layout and the print quality. Everything about it feels premium and the same goes for the music. I can honestly say that I have learned a lot from this book which has helped me to improvise and create music whenever I want. While i may be always learning, this book has brought me one step closer to mastery.

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