Meridee Winters Chord Crash Course: A Teach Yourself Piano Book for Older Beginners and Adults

As a professional singer myself, I wish this book had been available when I was young and just beginning to learn repertoire and build my piano skills in order to accompany myself. It has been an excellent back-to-basics resource for building my skills as an adult. I've recommended Chord Crash Course to many fellow singers of all ages, and without exception, they LOVE it. My piano skills as a young singer were not great, and having a book like this early on would have given me a solid understanding of chords and melody such that I could have quickly expanded my repertoire and learned new songs a lot faster than I did. I can imagine some other practical applications as well, including as a tool for singer/songwriters who might have a lot of great ideas in their heads, but limited theory and composition skills to get them onto paper and out into the world. A colleague who’s a piano teacher uses this book (on my recommendation) in conjunction with more traditional method books to help his students who want to be able to quickly learn new songs they hear, while still working on the regular technical aspects of their lessons. My favorite part of the book covers transposition (a CRITICAL tool for singers, songwriters, and accompanists, who often need to play and sing songs in very different keys from the original sheet music), how to read and play from lead sheets, and how to create an “open mic” song by choosing a chord progression and pattern from the lessons learned in the book. I think Chord Crash Course is a practical and fun tool for singers, songwriters, piano students, piano teachers, and accompanists of all ages, and I definitely recommend it!

I’m really glad I bought this book because it speaks to the ADHD in me. Honestly, the visuals are what grab my attention the most. You also get to learn chord symbols, which are super useful if you want to play jazz or make music with others later on. The way everything is broken down makes it so much easier to understand. Chord Crash is a great way to build up your music theory knowledge. If you’re taking lessons with a teacher, this works really well as extra practice at home. The author just knows how to explain things in an effective manner.

Great Book. Easy to understand.

Good for beginners

I took seven years of piano as a kid and confess I never got very good at it. I learned to read the music and play note by note, but I always felt that the reason I never learned to love it is that I never really understood the theory behind it. I've learned more about theory in a few hours with this book than I did in seven years of lessons. My muscle memory surprised me, so I basically flew through the first 68 pages of the book. I was learning a ton, but it was more "AH HA!" moments. I didn't have to spend much time with the practice because it is simple if you know how to play. It was pure fun to read about how the music works and then play the simple examples. When I got to transposing, I slowed a bit, but even there I'm finally learning something I never understood (honestly, after all those years, no one ever explained me what it meant for a song to be in a certain KEY. I just read the notes and played them). Love, love, love this book. I wish this was how I had started as a child. I think I would have been a better piano player. My only complaint is that the format of the book is not designed to lay flat, so I'm constantly fighting it to make it stay open on my stand. This was extra annoying because I wanted to read it and play it so badly. This seems like a pretty major oversight in a piano book. I almost want to photo copy the whole thing and put it in a binder to get around it. Prepare to be annoyed with the book itself.

I am an amateur musician nearing senior citizen status, who recently got her first keyboard since youth. This book enabled me to understand things that have always been illusive and got me playing all my instruments better because I'm now more able to recognize patterns instead of learning note by note. I'm even starting to write songs. Things I'd heard of and read about before made since once I tried Meridee Winter's hands on musical examples that encouraged my own creativity. Best of all, it was easy and super fun. My biggest obstacle was my own intimidation about trying to learn music theory, but it's hard to be scared of a children's book with cartoons, and once I saw how well everything was explained I felt comfortable and eager to learn more. In fact, I can't wait til book two comes out.

This is a great book for starting to learn accompaniment and lead sheet playing. I’m a beginner. Almost everything in this first book is in the key of C (white keys only)so the complexity of the lessons are confined to the harmony, beat, improvisation, and the chord progression thing. Eventually you’ll have to learn the umpteen key variations using the black keys, but this is a lovely place to start. The other two Chord Crash Course books gets into that. I have a teacher and we are using this along with some other sources which present five key scale exercises in more keys. I guess you could use this to self teach, but if you live near a teacher (or can find one online, one-on-one I suppose) who likes accompaniment and lead sheets as a skill and you can afford the $150 or so a month for the lessons, along with a book series of this type, I think you might stick with it a little better. Just my approach.

Small font and some MAJOR graphic design errors make this book REALLY hard to read. Guess it was NOT proofread. As an art director and designer this drives me nuts. So here's the deal. Like I said, good book and I've gone through mine and made corrections and fixed them. On most the the music note letters when ready the music and symbols the graphic artsit did not bring the music symbols to the front of the horizontal lines. So, the lines are ON TOP of the letters, making it almost unreadable. I've added my own letters so it is readable. This is a MASSIVE ERROR!!!! This book should be pulled from print and fixed and re-printed. Yep, I know exaclty how expensive this is. Everything needs to be slightly bigger. I highly recommend hiring a much more experienced and professional graphic artist to create your book. It has a ton of potential.... really, it's pretty awesome. This just seems like the rough cut, so to speak. Improve it and you've got a hit. But as is, I can't recommend it. Sorry. Or you can just fix it yourself and enjoy it. The content is spot on, just the execution is poor.

I’m learning piano as an adult and I had been getting stressed with terms just getting thrown at me out of nowhere - harmonic thirds, Phrygian scales, arpeggios and everything. I also was getting so confused that no one seemed to be able to explain what a chord or scale was, just that these three notes are a C chord. I was certain that someone must have written a book that actually explains this from the beginning and this book did!! It’s fun and light-hearted and interesting and very clear and everyone loves it - my piano teacher said she wished she had it when she was beginning and even my boyfriend is doing it along with me even though he is a lot better than I am at chords and scales :) Highly recommend.

Das Buch ist natürlich auf Englisch, aber jetzt kann ich endlich abends nach der Arbeit etwas auf dem Klavier klimpern und es hört sich toll an. Seit ich dieses Buch habe, macht Klavier spielen wieder Spaß! Ich übe auch wieder andere Stücke und ich verstehe die Zusammenhänge der Akkorde. Ich bin wirklich begeistert. Die Noten sind einfach zu spielen, aber das Ergebnis ist ganz unkompliziert Musik.

ce livre n'est pas comme les autres, il permet de travailler les fondamentaux avec une pédagogie vraiment parfaite, j'ai des le début éprouvé une grande émotion tellement tout est à la fois efficace, agréable à jouer et musical . cette méthode est pour moi un véritable choc tellement elle est efficace !!! au contraire des autres "méthodes" le plaisir de jouer et d'apprendre est juste incroyable . je conseil vivement cette excellente méthode pour travailler les accords et l'accompagnement au piano.

Initially the cartoonish layout dismayed me but the content is really good. I actually enjoyed working through this book as everything you do sounds so good. This is a pleasant supplement to the slog through my adult beginner method book.

I'm 29 and recently took up piano lessons. I'm currently at the level of grade 1 ABRSM but find it so frustrating that I can't play any ACTUAL songs. The songs I learn in my lessons are for the purpose of learning, not playing. They're so short! When I want to spend an hour or three at the piano I just have to play the same songs over and over and over and it gets so boring. So this book is perfect, I whizzed through it in 5 sittings and have thoroughly loved learning chords. Now I can sit at the piano and play around for hours making up my own melodies or learning existing songs by just Googling the chords and figuring it out the transposition. I'm so happy this book exists. I don't think you need to be able to read music to use the book, although it would definitely be an advantage, but you DEFINITELY need to know the notes on the piano without thinking about them, otherwise I imagine progress through the pieces would be extremely slow. I do wish it wasn't all black and white inside as I'm a very visual person and so colours would be helpful, but it's still great. Can't wait to get the green book next. I hope there is a blues version out there somewhere. Tip - learn your scales. This book is almost entirely in the key of C (which obviously not all songs are) so knowing your scales is essential to learn to transpose they way they teach you to in this book.