Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63653 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent introduction to musical harmony for all musicians
Highly readable if you want to understand and apply musical harmony in a wide range of musical genres. Acts either as tutotial or as reference from beginners to fairly advanced. Covers all the interesting aspects for non-experts. Explains the difference between major do-re-mi and minor scale, plus why pentatonic major and minor scales make improvising easier. Explains how you can derive from a melody line first a series of chords then harmonised parts, how to find the key centre in a chord sequence, blues harmony, blues melody, blues rhythm, chord inversions, sevenths, ninths, modes, melodic minor scale, tension and resolution, flattended fifths, modulation and lots more! Brilliant!

Good theory for the improving musician
This book has some great exercises and some neat tricks to help memorise aspects of music theory. It's nicely paced, starting very basic and going to reasonably advanced. I would have awarded more stars but for three flaws: (i) some aspects are poorly explained - the authors knew what they meant but had difficulty expressing it unambiguously, (ii) some of the answers to the exercises are wrong (B# does not equal Cb, despite what this book says!) which does not help if you are just starting out, and (iii) there is little differentiation between what is useful theory and what is obscure. However, given that you take those caveats on board, I would still recommend this book for its accessability and well structured approach.