The Real Rock Book Volume I, a great find!

The Real Rock Book, Volume I
Hal Leonard Publishing ISBN 978-1-4234-5388-8

What a Great Find!

During my Thanksgiving trip to visit family in Prescott Arizona, I found a terrific book that I just want to tell everyone about. The book is "The Real Rock Book Volume I" by Hal Leonard publishing.

I bought it because it is not like any other song book in my library. What makes it different is that it has EVERYTHING but the bass clef! There is just so much more detail than I have ever seen in a “Fake” book. So I thought well maybe all the “Real” series of books are done like this. Not So! I could not find another one like this.

No skimping on detail here! Whoever put this book together for Hal Leonard was a journeyman musician who got not one single credit for the work. I also like that the chords are in a nice big bold handwritten style that is easy for my old eyes to read.

The illustration below will give you an idea of how well each piece is treated. Each piece identifies each section as intro, outro, verse, bridge, interlude, chorus, whatever. It appears to me that every attempt has been made to make it match the recorded version of the song.

My son Robert, who plays bass guitar, has an extensive song library on his iPad. I watched as he picked songs from this book, played them from his iPad through his amp and accompanied them on his bass by following the chords in the book. It seemed that in most cases, the song in the book matched the key in which the song had been recorded and followed the original arrangement.  I gifted him the book before I left and ordered myself one from Amazon as soon as I got home.

There are 200 songs in the book , by my count and only one,  “Walk Don’t Run”, an instrumental by jazz guitarist Johnny Smith, has no lyrics. Every other song in the book, has the lyrics and multiple verses. You will also find things like "Guitar Solo" or "Harmonica Solo", even "w/ lead voc. ad lib", things that help you re-create the original recorded sound.
It gets even better. I did not find a single song that required a page flip!. To me, that shows an editor that cares about their readers. Most songs in this book occupy two pages and start on the left page.

I'm looking at "Hard Habit To Break" (HHTB) on page 126, and it is in the key of F#. On two side by side pages it shows Intro with "keys" in m1 and "flutes" in m2, good stuff to emulate with a keyboard. Also shows verse, chorus, Bridge, Trombone Solo, Outro-Chorus sections. All you need to try to re-create, if you want, or just dress up the piece or just pick up technique. This is not a simplistic Fake Book. It shows 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and slash chords. Some measures show the written out comped chords. 

Page 2 of "Hard Habit To Break" on page 127
Check out the comping detail in the bridge.

For example, in the bridge of HHTB you will find: F/A F-/Ab Eb/g Eb-/Gb Bbmaj7 in one measure, The comped chords are fully written out below the chord symbols. Thats a lot of attention to detail, which I'm sure is intended to let the reader re-create the original sound.

There is a review ot this book on Amazon entitled “Mediocre Song Selections” which I felt compelled to refute, because this is an extremely well done book and it deserves a large audience. Furthermore, I have not found it’s equal in the Real/Fake book genre.

As far as the song selections go, almost all of the 200 songs in this book will be readily identified by anyone interested enough in a book entitled “The Real Rock Book” to read its reviews.

The book by itself is terrific, but to be able to play the original recording and use the book to add in your own stuff is a really fun bonus.

This is a five-star book, no doubt about it. Kudos to its Editor and Hal Leonard Publishing!

Tory The Four Legged Turkey

This is a picture of Tory, the four-legged turkey that spent Thanksgiving  with us in 2004. 

Tory was a memorable bird who also took a very nice picture, wouldn't you say?

Anyway, this old bird has quite a story. If you enjoy a good story,

Click Here, (you won't be disappointed).

A Williams Sonoma Thanksgiving Planner

Here is my favorite Thanksgiving planner. It was published by Williams Sonoma in 2000 and has been my Thanksgiving Buddy ever since. It is just chock full of useful information that works year after year. It begins with a menu and ends with a checklist. In between there are preparation tips, all the recipe's, and lots of information about turkeys. 

Click here to view this great Thanksgiving planner.

Wendy Vo With Just Four Years of Study

Wendy Vo, an eight year old Vietnamese girl, started her musical study at age four. Take a look at this video of her playing Tico Tico. I think she has been very diligent about practicing.

Wendy is pretty extraordinary and got a nice write-up in Forbes, in an article entitiled "10 Role Models 18 And Under".  She's fun to watch and will probably be fun to follow. Isn't it amazing what we are capable of doing?

Musical Toys

They say the only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys. And if they haven't, its about time somebody did! I gathered some pictures of my Kawai CP451 and my Wurlitzer 4520, along with my son Robert's favorite guitars, and uploaded them to a Picassa Web Album, and here is the link: Instrument Slides
I wanted to do something with a slide show because my Blogger classmate, Selah, has lots of photos she wants to share. She has a very well written blog going. It makes for quite interesting reading. Click here to view it.

Wurlitzer 4520. From roadhouse to my house
and now needing a new home.

Now then, about these instruments, Pictured above is a Wurlitzer 4520 that was made in the 1970s and still has that wonderful Wurlitzer sound with all voices, keys and pedals in perfect working order. 4520 was my first real buddy before I hooked up with CP175, discussed in Current Piano Musings.
The other instruments in the slide show belong to my son, Robert, who is an actual performing bass guitarist.

Robert and Baxter

Baxter

1962 Fender Bass

Robert calls the Fender bass, Robby Jr. because it is the same age as he is. 

He also has a Baxter and a traveling bass and lots of other stuff that I don't know anything about.

Summer Players, Summer Not

It always fascinates me to watch a good piano player. They have this gift of being able to use their hands to express their emotions. To some it comes naturally. To others not so much. I am in the latter category. More than that, I'm more of an autumn player and maybe even a winter player. Still, I'm grateful for what I can do at a piano.

When you watch someone play, it looks really easy. So people say to themselves “I’d like to do that. Maybe I should take a couple of lessons.” Then they take a few lessons and discover that it takes more than just attending a class. They discover that they have to work at learning how to do it. Then they think they would rather do something else at that time. Then they forget about it. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just human nature. We try a thing to see if it's right for us and if it isn’t, we move on.

So here is what I think is the big secret about learning to play piano in the summer of our lives… 

You just have to love it!

If you love it, you’ll make time for it. The exercises won’t be boring and it won’t even be work. You’ll practice, and you’ll love the practice. You’ll keep practicing and you’ll keep getting better and you’ll love it even more. And the next thing you know you’ll be saying what you’ve always wanted to be able to say… “I can play!”

No matter what the season, just being able to say that, will make you feel pretty doggone good.

Current Piano Musings

CP175, a good piano buddy.

This is my piano buddy and good friend. I call my friend Buddy but it's real name is Kawaii CP175, which is much too formal for a friend that I play with so frequently. We usually spend about an hour together early in the morning. I don't feel guilty when I play early in the morning and that's important to me. When it gets past 8am, I just feel that I had better do something productive, like the rest of the people in the world. But when it comes right down to it, I'd rather be playing with Buddy.

Kawaii CP175 is a pretty sophisticated instrument. It is able to morph into just about any musical instrument you can name. It's lots of fun to play with, but I always start with exercises that I think will make me a better player if I get really good at them. So we always play a scale session around the 12 majors, but we do everything we can to make them sound more like riffs than scales. My left hand arpeggios the major chord and lets my right hand have fun with its scale, playing a few notes up and down in short riffs, in trips and quads quarters and making up melody as we go. After a while, I can just close my eyes because my fingers remember what's sharp and flat and when to tuck and when to jump and how far. We go forth from fourth to fourth, starting with B then on to E A D G C F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb, all twelve. I like them all, but the most fun to play have at least two black keys because my fingers seem to be able to do more tricks with them.

Well that's a lot of fun, but I mostly play chords from fake books, so its a good idea to get some practice with all the chords in each major scale. I discovered early on, when working on the key of C, that I could just play a triad up the white keys from middle C to treble C. Those triads turn out to be C Dm, Em F G Am Bdim and C, or to play them in any key you could call them I ii iii IV V vi VIIdim I. (caps are majors and lower case are minors and the Romans get credit for the numbering system).

Unfortunately, when played sequentially these chords don't sound very musical. So when Buddy and I do our chord practice we play them forth from fourth to fourth like this: I, IV, VIIdim, iii, vi, ii, V7, I. In the key of C the chords would be C, F, Bdim, Em, Am, Dm, G7, C.  No black keys there so its not much fun, But in the key of B the chords would be B, E, A#dim, D#m, G#m, C#m, F#7, B. See? Five black keys and much more interesting. If you would like to see which chords we play in each of the twelve keys, go to this web page and paste the following into the chords field: 

I-IV-VIIdim-iii-vi-ii-V7-I

Click [View It] and you will see a table that shows that chord progression in each of the twelve major keys. If you really look at that table, you will see that every major chord appears three times, every minor chord appears three times, every diminished chord appears once and every seventh chord appears once. So when we play the table, we are reinforcing our ability to play the seven chords of a key in all twelve keys. The best part is that this progression sounds very musical because the fourth to fourth progression is the most prevalent progression in music.

To make it even sweeter (and this puts my wife back to sleep), Buddy adds a string section and sometimes an orchestra to back up the piano as we chord our way through the table of keys, using arpeggios and blocks in one hand or the other, softening the minors, strengthening the majors and making music out of nothing at all.

And before we know it, its 8am!