Play Piano in a Flash!: Play Your Favorite Songs Like a Pro -- Whether You've Had Lessons or Not!

In spite of all the review, I was not quite sure what this book would teach me, hence this attempt to write another review.The book is full of enthusiasm and encouragement ("Yezzz! you can...") which may annoy those who prefer a no-nonsense style, but others find fun to read. As a consequence the author uses the first half ot the book to convey the idea of playing chords with the left hand and melody with the right; An idea that he could have told in a page or two. I guess the reason is that the author is clearly concerned with not loosing those readers who think that playing the piano is too difficult for them.The next half is far more interesting in my opinion. Here the author explains how to create variety in you play, with ideas like using rythmic patterns in the left hand, runner ups on the righ etc. The book provides address to a webpage with sound files, including downloadable MP3, so you can hear how these techniques sounds. This part presents may good ideas, and the sound files provide lot of encouragement in demonstrating how simple ideas can make a lot of a difference. Beware though, that such techniques are not mastered in a flash. The first time you tries it, you will not be able to keep a rythmic pattern in the left hand and focus on the melody on the right hand.Houston tries to avoid the word practice. There is almost no sheet music in the book (except a few blues bass patterns), and Houston suggest that you move directly to your favourite tune (you have to find it somewhere else, no tunes are included). Thus you are not practising but playing your favourite tune. This makes a lot of sense, since it is more fun to work with the melodies you love, and besides you know how thei'r supposed to sound, so they are easier to read. This mimimizes the need to read music to the absolute minimum. Still, if you are new to the piano, it will take you some time to be able to coordinate playing chords with the left and the tune with your right hand. "A flash" thus refers to within days rather than months. And as you adopt more of the ideas of how to create more variety in you play, more coordination is required, and the more time you should expect to spend by the piano to become fluent in using the ideas in your playing.In short the book explains how to play tunes on the piano with a minimun of music reading. It also provides ideas of how to proceed to create more variety in you play, with sound files to illustrate how it may sound. If you are a novice to the piano, the book may teach you how to play your favourite tune within days (unless it is a difficult one with a complex chord progression), but it may take you years to master all the different ideas presented.

OK, I'm 68. Am a music amateur fluent in woodwinds and strings, but not keyboard. I know too much music to be patient with a teacher. I should be able to play off lead sheets, but I have not gotten off the ground until I ran across Scott Houston's method.What a simple idea! Who cares what key the song is in? How about make all the songs in C? Why not? Nobody will know.I have a few books that try to tech DIY piano playing without years of lessons. They don't make sense to me. I tried a seminar where jazz standards on a lead sheet are played with select jazz voicings. I learned 1 song in 1 year (Misty). It sounds great and I hope to continue, later. But I need to play songs, in however simple a way. I need to know which buttons to push.But how about "Root position chords in the left, melody in the right"? It's not immediately easy, but it comes after awhile. And the thing is, since I have 70 songs, all in the key of C, I don't get bored. These are all really nice, popular songs. Once I eventually get the chords and melody mastered, I expect to be voicing the chords nicer and using inversions and stuff. But for now, root position chords are good. Right, we don't want to do exercises, but this is enough of a drill to get the fingers hitting the right keys. I'm afraid I've heard too many 'experts' say that root position chords are bad. I don't care. I'll just keep playing and singing my 70+ songs in C. Oh, I ordered Volume 2 today.

"Play Piano in a Flash" covers some, but not all, of the basics you need to know in order to play piano. It also gives you some improvisational techniques that you can use when you become an intermediate player. Because this book provides an incomplete coverage of beginner topics, it should not be your primary source of instruction. It does make a good secondary piano book though.The best thing about "Play Piano in a Flash" is that it inspires you to WANT to play the piano. Few music books do this. Scott Houston rightfully believes that people are more likely to continue learning to play an instrument if they play songs that they WANT to play, rather than songs they are TOLD to play. If you don't love classical music, for example, you will lose interest if you spend much of your time practicing classical music.Scott Houston's writing style gets a bit annoying. The corny stuff that made his "Play Piano in a Flash" special on PBS so interesting just doesn't come across well in print. However, this isn't a novel; it's not like you're buying a piano book for its excellent prose. The way to judge a book like this is by what you get out of it. I found that I was much more interested in learning to play the piano after watching his PBS special and reading this book.If you were to buy only one introductory piano book, I would recommend  The FastTrack Keyboard Method - Book 1  by Blake Neely and Gary Meisner. But there's no reason to only buy one piano book. In fact, these two books compliment each other quite well.

This book is quite clever actually. It shows how most songs have similar patterns, which when learnt allow you to play lots of music quickly. The only downside is that this book does not teach you how to compose your own music. But in terms of learning to play sheet music etc, this book is very useful.

Borrowed this book from our local library found it useful so decided to buy it.It will not teach you how to play and read music in the classical style, what it will do is give you the tools to be able to play a favourite tune on your keyboards, simple to follow and designed not to be scary when first starting playing.

In the words of the author , the best way to learn this method is to listen and imitate the various styles and techniques. Sadly the links to the examples are no longer active so the book is not very useful.It would seen the author has moved on to a webinar based sales offer for an interactive course and the website referred to in this book has been inactive for years and there is no update in this book to take you to a page where you can buy the CD of examples. This could be easily solved with a digital download page and a redirect from the old website but this may interfere with the new sales process.The method is very exciting as described

Es handelt sich um amerikanisches Taschenbuch.Der Autor versucht zu erklären, wie man Akkorde zu Melodien mit bereits vorhandenen Akkordangaben drücken kann.Dazu erklärt er die Noten im Violinschlüssel, die Namen der Klaviertasten und liefert Tastaturgrafiken der Dreiklänge und der Septakkorde in der Grundstellung.Die beim flüssigen Spiel benötigten Umkehrungen muss der Leser selbst finden.Begleitmuster, oder wie man selbst Begleitungen entwickeln kann, lernt man so sicher nicht.Musikalisch ist dieser Weg des Spiels kein Highlight. Es klingt eher unbeholfen und bruchstückhaft.Mir scheint der Preis im Verhältnis zum Nutzen nicht gerechtfertigt.

Ich bin selber ein (Noten)Analphabet aber mit diesem Buch wird alles plötzlich verständlich. Man lernt im 'Nu' Noten lesen und Klavier spielen. Absolut empfehlenswert für Leute die sich etwas 'Gutes' tun wollen.