Product Description
Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this concise introduction to composing starts right in with a brief composition exercise, then proceeds step by step through a series of increasingly complex and challenging problems, gradually expanding the student’s musical grammar. “This is a wonderful book for anyone who is developing improvising skills or who would like a fun way to explore music.”–Jim Stockford, Co-Evol… More >>
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Beat Thang
If you are a real musician or lyricist, this book will help inspire you and give you some background in the format of western pop music. I recommend this book to any seroius songwriter, but please no more songs about butterflies!
Rating: 5 / 5
Every keyboard player should buy this book. This book contains the most straightforward explanation of diatonic harmony in print. It can transform your keyboard playing.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was very helpful to me; the excercizes have you writing right away, and I liked that- learning by doing. I had very little technical knowledge when I started, but it didn’t hinder me from understanding and using this book. I think this is an excellent starting point for someone just learning to compose. It is encouraging to be writing right away, especially when something ends up sounding good. I never thought I could write music!
Rating: 5 / 5
I see that most people have high ratings for this book, but I cannot give it more than 2 stars for several reasons. First of all, the book does give a ton of exercises, but I didn’t find these very useful–most of them were very simple exercises that had restrictions on how you could write the piece. This book does give much information about music theory, and the author does allow you to use this theory to write small (usually 10-15 bar) monophonic melodies, but by the end of the book this was all that I had learned to do. Yes, I did learn a lot of theory but I did not learn how to use the theoretical concept to its fullest potential when I composed a piece. At the end of the book, I found that, since the book gave me no practice at writing for more than one instrument at a time, I was not any better of a composer than I was at the start of the book.
In my opinion, the author should add a CD to the book to illustrate how each concept he teaches is used to its fullest potential in a musical example. A major part of learning to compose is to listen and imitate–without listening, how are you supposed to know how to use this new music theory that you have just learned?
Overall, the book is just a music theory book with a bunch of useless (to me, anyway) compositional exercises. Perhaps this book is for people who already have experience composing for a while. Personally, I am an ameateur and have piano skills and I wanted a book to teach me to compose, but I am afraid it did not help me very much, and I don’t think it will help other ameateurs either.
Rating: 2 / 5
“Imagine that you have been captured by the Lorac, a warlike tribe ruled by Edrevol, who will spare you life only if you please him with the music you write for the Imperial Flute…”
If you’ve ever wanted to take a note for a walk, Russo’s guide will tease, challenge, and entice you to commit it to paper. The especial strength of this book is that you get a few rules at a time with each exercise: some only hint at why you should do some things to create a musically interesting composition; others state flat-out why some effects work. Learn by doing!
Rating: 5 / 5