Play Piano in a Flash!: Play Your Favorite Songs Like a Pro - Whether You've Had Lessons or Not! Paperback – Illustrated, 14 Jan. 2004

excellent thankyou

Borrowed this book from our local library found it useful so decided to buy it.It will not teach you how to play and read music in the classical style, what it will do is give you the tools to be able to play a favourite tune on your keyboards, simple to follow and designed not to be scary when first starting playing.

This book is quite clever actually. It shows how most songs have similar patterns, which when learnt allow you to play lots of music quickly. The only downside is that this book does not teach you how to compose your own music. But in terms of learning to play sheet music etc, this book is very useful.

Despite the title, this book is actually very poor value-for-money. It is a short paperback on the idea that for playing popular music, classical piano lessons do not work, and that it is more useful to learn to play left handed block chords and right handed melody. However, it does not provide exercises to learn this technique, just a list of chord positions. Much more useful is e.g. Alfreds basic adult piano course.

I read this book before I had any piano lessons and found it quite useful at the time. It is written in a typically American style and was easy to read not too technical and provided some useful information. The style of play it advocates (left hand only plays chords, right hand plays melody) is to be found in any book that teaches you how to play an electronic keyboard. It is no substitute for taking lessons though.