Product Description

This step-by-step approach to learning how to play left-hand bass lines at the keyboard includes examples and exercises covering the chord progressions and styles players will encounter. Keyboardists at all levels will benefit from this book's focus on: walking bass lines, playing in a "two-feel," waltz time, Latin styles, putting both hands together, and more. The exercises for each chapter are recorded on the accompanying CD.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147020 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-01
• Released on: 1998-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780793569274
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Customer Reviews

Base Line Practice If You Love Drills
I got this book hoping for some good "base line" advice. Well, I have to admit this book was a lot more complex than I thought a book on this topic would be. Usually, jazz theory books have maybe a page or two dedicated to base lines. Well, this book is about 100 pages dedicated to all kinds of drills for base lines, mostly the II-V-I progression. Basically it's filling in base notes in between chords, using chordal or non-chordal notes, in different time sequences. The CD runs through all of the drills, which are mostly minor permutations of the last one played. I was kind of hoping for a little more advice on how to construct good base lines if you're using other types of progressions. And also maybe something on how baselines relate to chords, pedal point, slash chords, or non-tonal polychordism. Then again this is just a book on base line playing, so I won't be hard on this book because this stuff is obviously very challenging, and it requires a lot of practice, so this author decided that this is the only way to go with it. Get it if you're into to base line playing for old standards.

Excellent book, great content and well organized
This book is very well written and well organized, it exceeded my expectations and covered not just how to play good bass lines but how to play off the bass lines. It is also very nicely printed and easy to read, my only complaint being that a few of the exercises have unnecessary page turns in them.

The book introduces a series of simple rules for creating bass lines, shows examples of how each rule is used, then puts the different rules together with plenty of exercises. What I like best is how the author explains how he builds up the lines rather than just presenting a sequence of notes to play.

The areas where I got most out of this book where in how to play the right hand against a walking bass to create to create lots of rhythmic interest. It also gave me a much better idea of how to use rootless chords effectively, which is something I never quite figured out until I went through the exercises in this book.

A Good Idea But The Execution Is Not Perfect
I was really psyched up to go through this enire book methodically and become a baseline expert, but I quickly got bogged down and discouraged. The first two excercises go through a simple bass line progression in all 12 keys and have the right hand comp-chords written out. Unfortunately the CD plays so fast that I had trouble playing along with it perfectly and ended up reinforcing sloppy finger technique. All the rest of the exercises show the left hand only and do not show the right hand comp-chords. That presented a problem for me because I am not secure on right hand voicings and rhythm so I had to pencil in the comp rhythms from the first two excercises onto the following exercises. Starting with the 5th exercise the book stops showing the bass lines transposed into all 12 keys and instead only shows them transferred into about 4 keys. The book "helpfully" suggests that the student transpose it in his head into all the other keys. Well, that sounds easy until one actually tries doing it, especially as the CD only has (very, very fast) accompaniments for a few of the keys instead of all 12. I found that the base lines were so similar to each other that it got pretty boring to practice after a couple of weeks. I'm putting the book aside for the time being because I've found some other books on keyboard voicings that are a better use of my time. I realize Valerio's book is the only one available on the subject so I shouldn't complain. It's probably my fault that I can't seem to find the right approach for making good use of the book. Perhaps I should just play the left hand without a right hand at all, and only play in the keys he wrote the exercises in. I really don't know.