How to Play from a Fake Book (Keyboard Edition)

I am an intermediate student of keyboard music, and know a fair amount of theory. But I don’t have extensive experience reading fake books. A few conventions of chord symbols escaped me, so I turned to this book. I was quite amused by the breezy style of the presentation, but reading and constructing chords from symbols is a MAJOR focus here. It is presented in a careful progression, and I was delighted at how quickly I was able to grasp everything I needed to move to the next level in reading a fake book. I now understand C7/E and Cmaj9, as well as how to voice and modify different chords and clusters.It has good reference summaries and ample examples of well known songs to practice on at each level of symbol reading.I couldn’t be more pleased with the purchase. That said, I can imagine that students with a lot more or a lot less experience than I might wish a different level of instruction.

I ordered this book for a student who specifically wanted to learn how to play from a fake book. My father also teaches and this was for his student. It is a very comprehensive book filled with technique and explanations on how to use the left hand so you can proficiently accompany the melody using only chord symbols for your left hand. I've played from fake books for years, and some people ask how I do it. This book gives perfect explanations and examples of how to do it. With a full understanding of chords, how to create rhythms using the left-hand and more, you will be playing from a fake book in short order, provided you already know how to read the treble clef, or melody line. I would not teach one of my younger piano students from this book, because it's my job to teach them how to read the grand staff, both treble and bass clef. But, for an older student who already knows how to read music, and understands chords, this is perfect.

Definitely not for beginners. Get a few years of piano under your belt before starting this book! Otherwise, you’re just spending time doing drills and not actually learning the stuff this book is really trying to teach. I’m an intermediate player with a decent grasp of chords and music theory, which meant the first 20 pages or so were just a nice refresher course and I was able to breeze through it pretty quickly. I’m on page 30 now and while it’s still pretty easy I still find it helpful as a way of reinforcing the foundation I already have whole also teaching me a few new tricks about how to think about chords (sometimes with a nice dose of humor!). I’ll update this review in a few weeks once I’m further along, but so far really liking this book!(Update) Ok 2 more weeks and I’m on page 60 now. I’ve also skimmed through the rest of the book. While I still like this book and recommend it, be aware that it focuses a lot on learning all the different chords (which of course is very important for fake books). It was also great for me as I didn’t know some of the more advanced chords and it does a great job of explaining what they are and how they work (essentially). Think of it as basic but practical music theory. If you’re looking to really master taking a fake book and improvising impressive chord variations, this book will only get you so far. You’ll learn all the basics and it’ll up to you to build on top of that.

I like this book. the songs it contains and the chords introduced. Its fun to play. My only complaint is that the type and musical notation could be larger but I am going to find my old music stand so I can move the book closer to the keyboard. Or I guess I could buy much needed glasses.What makes it interesting is that it offers more than the 3 basic chords. Nice sounds. Its music I grew up with so people who are under 50 or so -- when TV stopped the music shows -- may not be acquainted with this music .. but if that's the case, go online and have a listen! Great fun.

This book was not what not I was hoping for. Based on the title and description I had hoped it would be a book about taking chords and melody from a modern jazz fake book and creating an opulent interesting solo jazz piano rendition. I would have been happy if it was even about how to create cocktail piano arrangements from just chord diagrams and a melody.Instead this is a book about music theory, especially jazz harmony, and how to take lackluster sheet music chord suggestions and beef them up through adding tension or color notes or substituting more hip chords.If you are someone who wants to learn a bit about jazz harmony without diving deep, this book will give you some basic tricks and ideas to make the chords on sheet music sound richer and more modern. However there is no help as to how to make that into an actual arrangement. "Arrangements" are only shown as blocked chords, mostly on one or on one and three with the melody played in the right hand.In short, what you come away with is a better starting skeleton with nicer chords, but the so called "arrangement" is still a barebones starting point and not real piano music yet.You still need to break up the chords into bass lines, broken arpeggios, fills and scale passages to actually have a musical arrangement. This book does not discuss this. I was looking for a book that describes this process of getting from chords and melody in a fake book to creating an actual piano musical performance.Last, the premise of this book seems to be that any sheet music you have is going to have uninteresting simplistic chord choices in need of alteration. However, there are tons of good jazz fake books these days where this has already been done including even standard Christmas carols and hymns harmonized in the jazz idiom.I think this book might be a good starting point for a pianist interested in gaining a superficial introduction to jazz chord substitution and alteration. However, if that is really what you are after I would skip ahead and just buy The Jazz Harmony Book by David Berman as it is a very clear, well organized, unintimidating and very systematic tutorial about this topic. It walks you slowly through ever-deeper layers of altering and enriching harmonies and does so in a very systematic way as a good teacher would use. Its a good read to boot which can't be said of most harmony texts. And that one comes with a CD to illustrate all the techniques.

En ocasiones, Fake Book se relaciona con Real Book, y por lo tanto con el jazz, pero un fake book es un libro de cualquier género musical que incluye la melodía y los acordes. Generalmente la melodía la hace la mano derecha y la izquierda acompaña de diversas formas dependiendo del conocimiento del ejecutante. Este libro se enfoca en eso, en la forma en la que un cifrado de acordes se convierte en algo dinámico. Comienza con sólo tocar la tónica de cada acorde, luego triadas, pero luego avanza a patrones y voces más completas. Los ejemplos que utiliza son del repertorio tradicional norteamericano como Danny Boy o Oh Susannah, la idea es que sean melodías muy simples para enfatizar la forma en la que progresivamente se pueden hacer acompañamientos cada vez más enriquecidos. Muy útil para quien crea sus propios arreglos de melodías populares de cualquier género.

The media could not be loaded.  This is a great book to learn chords easily!!! I can finally play decently from a fake book!!!I have been teaching myself to play the piano over the last 3 years. I can read notes and play from relatively simple classical scores. Then I tried to learn chords. I have no less than 4 other books but found it difficult to sort through all the complicated explanations and just could not remember enough chords. I gave up learning chords for almost a year. Then I found this book in my local library. It was the only copy and it was so worn out that the librarian almost refused to let me borrow it. I finally did, loved it and bought a new one for myself. After just a few weeks, I am already playing songs from my fake books and creating my own left-hand patterns.Before you start with this book, you should be able to read and play notes already but I think it is not absolutely necessary to know all the scales. The lessons are arranged systematically in chapters so you need to finish 1 chapter before moving on to the next. The great things about this book:1. Shortcuts to find chords are given.2. There are chord learning exercises, e.g., moving from 1 chord to the next. I found them to be extremely helpful and did them repeatedly to help me find and remember the chords.3. There are many simple songs throughout each chapter to practice the chords.4. The explanations are simple, without all the technical jargon that I have found in other books.Although there may not be that many left-hand patterns, the basic ones are given so that you will be able to create your own. I am so thankful to have finally found the perfect chord teaching book and that I can finally play so many songs from fake books!

Great book. Perfect to start playing from fake books. I am a classical piano student but wanted to add pend some time playing something more easy listening.

This is a brilliant book, just what I wanted after following the system in another book, ('How to play popular piano in 10 easy lessons', by Norman Monath) That book was excellent to begin with, and I recommend that book as well, but I found it got a bit complicated in later chapters. This book is so enlightening, written in an easy-to-read style, with a touch of humour. I have found playing from a fake book so much easier since I bought this book, and I often dip into it. I really wanted to learn this method in order to play hymns. Some hymn books (eg Mission Praise) give guitar chords above the music, and I find them so easy to play using the method taught in this book. Wish I could give it 10 stars!

Libro enfocado a la práctica de canciones sencillas, principalmente con teclados, con ejemplos para tocar temas de Real Book de diferentes formas. No va dirigido a los Real Book de Jazz, como sí lo hace el libro de Robert Rawlins, sino a temas más sencillas, siendo posible su uso por músicos con pocas nociones de música.