Music : Instruction & Study

Learn to play the piano with this easy-to-follow guide. Ever wanted to play the piano but thought it looked too hard? This book will open the door to your musical side, introducing the basics of playing all variety of pianos and electronic keyboards. Using simple exercises and a sampling of popular songs in a range of styles, this book teaches the beginner who has never played or read music how to do both with proficiency. more...

Price: $18.95

Song has been a part of people's culture since the beginning. From classical and rock and roll to country and jazz - there are hundreds of thousands of budding and established songwriters burning to write the next great hit. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Songwriting is the one-stop resource for all inspiring songwriters to learn how much musical training is needed, how to put together the basics of a song for various popular genres, how to tailor songs to different industries (TV and film), how to get great ideas, where to find collaborators, publishers and agents and how the Internet is impacting the world of songwriting. more...

Price: $16.95

Ever wish you could sit down at a piano and just play a tune? • Have you taken lessons at some point in your life, but can't play a thing? • Are you sick and tired of dusting, not playing, that big hunk of furniture in your living room? • Have you bought an electronic keyboard that quickly found its way to your closet shelf? • Don't you wish you could play some carols for the family around the holidays? • Do you think you're just too busy or old (or both!) to take the time needed to learn piano? more...

Price: $9.95

Amid the recent increase in scholarly attention to rock music, Understanding Rock stands out as one of the first books that subjects diverse aspects of the music itself to close and sophisticated analytical scrutiny. Written by some of the best young scholars in musicology and music theory, the essays in this volume use harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, formal, and textual approaches in order to show how and why rock music works as music. Topics of discussion include the adaptation of blues and other styles to rock; the craft of songwriting; techniques and strategies of improvisation; the reinterpretation of older songs; and the use of the recording studio as a compositional tool. A broad range of styles and groups is covered, including Yes, the Beach Boys, Cream, k.d. lang, Paul Simon, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead.  more...

Price: $27.50

How do we 'know' music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes in a variety of contextual analyses. more...

Price: $64.00