I recently started learning the piano again after a 20+ year break. Very good, but you will likely need to buy an piano exercise book to supplement this material It sits flat easier.There are supposed to be accompanying CD, but I’m not sure if mine came with them or not (I’m a trucker and have taken on leaning with a keyboard and this book, wish me luck!) I wasn’t home when this was delivered, and didn’t think to look for it when I gathered up my stuff to hit the big road again. I’d recommend getting the spiral-bound, too. I have both, and the pinkish one progresses much faster and seems to have a bigger emphasis on chord progression/learnin by by chord, and without a single worksheet.THIS book starts you off with some physical warm-ups, then worksheets and warm ups, before giving you a short melody that incorporates the steps and bits of theory you were just working on. You can see from the pictures that there are fill-in-the-blank sections and pre-labeled sections.If you’re serious about taking the necessary time to learn this instrument fully, and the music completely, I’d recommend this book over the one with the pinkish cover and more straight on view of a grand (with a flower vase on it, that version is on Amazon, too, and by the same authors). So, as far as interactive lesson books go, this one is unbeatable!I have another Alfred’s book for level one and it is about half as interactive. (At least, I’m 40 pages into each, and they’re the same.)So now I have real buyer’s remorse… one of these is redundant. In fact AMAZON recommended them being bought together.So I bought them both.I just started them a few days ago (I thought I would use one for a few days, then use the other and decide which one I liked better to complete it before I finished the other one entirely.)This book and “Alfred’s Self-Teaching Adult Piano Course: The new, easy and fun way to teach yourself to play, Book & CD” are basically the SAME BOOK!This one has more “homework” exercises (writing in the manual itself, which I don’t care to do.) But the progression is the same, the songs are the same, almost page for page. Here’s my problem: When I looked at piano books on Amazon, this manual and “Alfred’s Self-Teaching Adult Piano Course: The new, easy and fun way to teach yourself to play, Book & CD” both had excellent ratings. Ok, first off, I actually like this book, and I actually like it a little better than 3 stars. WAIT! Before you buy more than one Piano Book! It’s probably just a digital keyboard, and it does a good job.s P.S.: it’s much more fun to play along with the CD than alone, and I apologize for calling the orchestra “cheesy”. Nor will you cause self-loathing from your formerly unaccompanied mistakes - things will straighten out surprisingly quickly. ![]() And with the “orchestra” in the background, working with you, you simply can’t fudge and give up on any passage. ![]() ![]() I’ve gone back to the beginning of the book (had zipped through 100 pages or so) and feel a big payoff from working with the CD. You set your CD remote to “repeat”, and you keep going again and again - some of these pieces are less than half a minute. Each song is preceded by two bars of clicks that set the tempo, so you’re learning not only how to play in time but how to get ready for what the tempo will be. I ordered the CD and that was the answer: you play along with a somewhat cheesy orchestral accompaniment that will rein you in if you play too fast, give you a nudge if you play too slow, and keep you on the right path while you work out your mistakes. A metronome could help, but I found same to be an added level of difficulty that does not seem worth it, at least in these early stages. What was missing was feedback on tempo and rhythm - you can’t trust yourself to judge yourself, not because of ego, but because you need an outsider to measure what you’re doing. After a few weeks with this book, starting from scratch, I was pleased with my progress but knew something important was missing.
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