Man, am I ever sick of people giving books one-star reviews and then criticizing them for not being what they were never supposed to be. It's not like you can't get another book to teach you the ins and outs of different styles, or how to put chords together into pleasing progressions, or how to read standard notation, or rhythm patterns for improvisation. There are literally THOUSANDS of books on such topics, which would have made it idiotic for the author to try to treat them when the goal was to provide something that IS NOT elsewhere available (as far as I know)- a one-stop reference for virtually every possible scale, mode, and chord possible, annotated with visuo-spatial diagrams that not only display everything highly intuitively, but in a way that could be understood by someone who is not only bereft of skills in music notation but FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE. That's right, if I ever have an autistic kid I am going to hand them a hundred dollar Casio and this book and create myself a keyboard idiot savant.



In fact, if you are CREATIVE, and EXPERIMENTAL, you can figure out quite a bit from this book alone, especially with modern keyboards providing automatic rhythms, etc. I started playing keyboard a year and a half ago, having NO PRIOR MUSICAL TRAINING, and this was the first book I used, being an intellectual masochist. In about two weeks, I knew more about scales and modes and chords than anybody I know probably ever will. Granted, when I say "people I know" I am talking about people hanging around a coffee shop, not a conservatory of music, but still. I started out by just messing around. I saw that there were charts showing which chords went with which scales so I just started playing those chords in the left hand and those scales in the right hand, just messing around. For instance, next to the chart for the major scale it says that it goes with major chords. So I looked to see which major chords were included in the scale, which is C, F, and G in the key of C. I played around, fingering different scales and varying rhythm, recorded some stuff, and listened to it. Some of it started sounding kind of similar to stuff I've heard.



I've had a lot of fun repeating this process over and over and "unlocking" the sounds that are "frozen" in different chords and scales. I haven't learned to read music yet (well, beyond All Cows Eat Grass and all that) and don't know any songs, yet still, I am capable of ripping off solos that have people going "WTF" and am capable of recording an infinite amount of recorded music (if I need a new song, I just pick a new scale, or mode of that scale, and start pecking away). Lately I have also begun playing some of the patterns out of the Pop Piano Book, so I can learn accompaniment styles and rhythms, and I am also thinking about getting The Classical Fake Book so I can study up on some sick melodies.



So really, I don't usually write reviews, but I wanted to write one here so that the book could get up to four and a half stars. I think by reading my review you can tell whether or not this is for you. I wholeheartedly recommend buying this book if you are a composer or improviser who didn't get lucky in life and who either didn't get to go to college or had to study something practical while they were there, and couldn't study something so trivial as music. Really, this is a college level instruction in a single book. Spend a few minutes a day with this, and maybe a supplemental book to teach you whatever styles you are interested in, and you might surprise yourself with how intuitive this all gets.