How to Write Songs on Keyboards: A Complete Course to Help You Write Better Songs

APPEARANCES: After opening the shipping package, I found that this book is in a format of 8.5 inches (wide) x 11 inches (high) x 5/8 inches (thick) with a glossy double-fold paper cover. As I fanned the 256 pages of the book across my face to glance at it, I saw lots and lots of pictures. Roughly, I saw about three or four paragraphs of text on the left pages and mostly diagrams on the right pages. I saw NO ["en", "oh"] musical staff with traditional musical notes though! A 90-track CD is included and well protected in a plastic pocket on the inside back cover. The book comes with a 1-page preface, 5-page introduction, 12 sections of mostly chord progressions, and a 14-page appendix which includes technique page references, chord diagrams, chord formulas, and a glossary of terms and concepts. Each of the 12 sections begins with its title and a famous quote printed on the left (even) page with a black background which helps to segregate itself from other sections visually. On the facing (odd) page, there is a discussion of a new concept or a special notation, followed by a series of techniques which are numbered the same way as their corresponding CD tracks. MY SUBJECTIVE OPINION: If you are like me (taking a year or so of piano lessons during your elementary years, being overwhelmed and bored with music theory in high school, forming a garage band, being able to read *some* music but mainly lyrics with chord tabs, attempting to expand your artistic traits by writing a song of your own, and being a VISUAL learner), this book is for you. If you are looking for a book on how to play keyboards, this book is NOT it. Go on with something else! If you expect a traditional way of learning music, beginning with music history, musical notations, concepts, techniques, examples, and exercises, this book is NOT for you, either. As mentioned above, you will NOT find a single musical staff with traditional musical notes in this book. None! Nada! You can stop reading this review and move on with another book! As Rikky Rooksby emphasizes his intentions in the Preface, he begins with "The simplest way to write a song is to put some chords together and then sing some words on top." He later continues, "You don't need to read music. Everything is laid out in easy-to-read diagrams..." The book is exactly it! The book has 256 pages and contains a total of 90 chord progressions, and you start finding the first diagram on page 15 and the last diagram on page 215. So, the chord progressions alone take 201 out of 256 pages which are 78.5% of the book. Good or bad is subjective! Each progression has a bar layout of a series of chords to be played (the song structure) and their corresponding keyboard diagrams of the chords. In these bar layouts, the author uses non-traditional but easy-to-understand notations for counting beats and measures, indicating intros, choruses, verses, bridges, repeats and ending, and representing chords or chord inversions. The chord diagrams intuitively show how you place your fingers on a keyboard to form the needed chords. Also, each progression is accompanied by a sound clip and is labeled clearly with a 3/4-inch-tall number corresponding to the track number on the included CD. So, the way I use this book to write a song is first to have some ideas or messages that I want to convey. Second, I turn to page 244 (Easy Page-Reference Table of Techniques) and look for a few techniques of expressing my mood. Some examples of such techniques are "how to make a blues bluesier", "how to make chords more romantic", "how to make minor chords threatening", "how to make progressions sound sophisticated", and so on. Third, I play the selected progressions while listening to the sample sound tracks. Fourth, I modify the chord sequence to fit my own mood while I am humming along for melody and rhythm. Fifth, I replace my humming with words and phrases while searching for extra syllables or using slurs if I'm short of syllables. Finally, I come up with a good title for the song. Voila! It's pretty much it! (Well, I use a MIDI keyboard hooked up to my PC with a MIDI software package to capture my music, and I play it back via the same keyboard or a MIDI-controlled sound module. The software helps me to print out the music sheets.) *************** IMPORTANT NOTE: *************** You must read the Preface, the Introduction, Section 1, the discussions of the remaining sections, and Section 10 in their entireties, or you will miss the point and get lost! PROS AND CONS: * Pros: This book helps me to "express my feelings" through chord progressions when I am writing music for a song. There are a lot of sample chord progressions for me to start with. The sound clips on the CD have a lot more going on in the music, much more than what are written in the book. * Cons: This book needs to expand more in the areas of creating melody, rhythm, lyrics, and rhymes to be qualified as a book of "how to write songs." Its focus is only on one aspect of writing songs--accompaniment--although it is an important one. Also, it would be nice if Rikky included the "traditional" musical notations of the progressions in the appendix to attract a larger musically inclined audience. In addition, if he included the MIDI files of the progressions on a data CD or posted them on the web, his readers would be able to import them into their computers to play them at different speeds, to print them out in the traditional musical notations themselves, or to use them as their springboards to write their own songs. RECOMMENDATION: Although some chord progressions may not be new to you, the work of collecting all those techniques in one place as a reference book is worth the money! If you have reached this line in my review, I strongly recommend you to buy this book. This book is for you! Otherwise, you would have been long gone since my fourth paragraph! :D

if it is anything like his guitar book, it will take off and be very valuable. this book states it is for beginner keyboard players as well as guitarists that want to use a keyboard to write songs. he is very knowledgeable and it would be GREAT if he wrote a book for a more advanced player. I am by no means an expert, but a slight intermediate would be accurate, lol. his guitar book goes at a great amount of theory and stuff and hopefully this book will do so as well. even if for beginners, you need to have info that goes beyond what they know, or they will need another book sooner than later. his writing style is nice and clear, so I knew I had to get this eventually.

Often times when I buy books, the author doesn't include every little detail. I have never seen an author communicate as clearly as Rikky Rooksby, and he lays things out exactly how I would have them in a perfect world. Normally, I read many different books to connect the dots, but this book it seems that won't be necessary because it is all explained so well. If that wasn't enough, you can double check the words by looking at the graphics. Maybe I do that over and over until it sinks in my head, this is the way I learn by repetition. Most of the time I skim books, but that is because I am only being provided with either surface information, or information I think is not important. However, in this book it seems he has such a great understanding of the subject, he arranges the chapters with information that you really need to know. I highly recommend this book.

I like that there is a track for each subject, although some of them not as clear as i would've wished for. It gives you the perfect tools for writing a song, and most importantly how to get there faster. If you are a beginner, it will give you a solid base, if you are advanced, it gives you a good "review" on how certain chords can give you "that feeling or mood". I would recommend it to anyone..

If studied faithfully, this course can transform your ability to look at chord progressions/harmonic structure objectively, and also highlight a mood in a song which can form the direction of the overall song. When you consider that 80%+ songs are originally written on keyboard (including Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run; the entire album), this book is a mainstay in any songwriters library. Having studied music formally, it is the overall understanding of harmony (chords) which will either make or break a song, or piece of music. In my daily practice regime (2-4 hours daily) I spend about 30 minutes with this book hashing out tried and true examples of chord progressions which I can use for songs (at this writing, 45 songs). The added ability and strength of this book is that it will increase your curiosity for music theory, without bombarding you, eg. learning your keys to write some interesting songs, ie. a song written in G major is going to sound completely different in mood if it's transposed to Bb. For anyone willing to spend the time studying this book, the return in the command of harmonic theory and songwriting prowess will be a reward worth waiting for. 10/10.

Good book but missing the audio examples.

A good book that will open up your imagination on chord patterns that create emphatic melodies. Takes sections step by step, from simple to advanced. These are chords you have heard time and again with popular hit songs. You just didn't know why they worked. Buy this book and you will understand the paths taken by others, in addition to forming new paths of your own.

Wanted to explore how one can tackle music for a keyboard. Very interesting concepts used.

３和音のインバージョンを組み合わせて簡単なキーボードアレンジと言うような感じです。 また「SONG WRITING sourcebook」もあわせて購入しましたがこれは私にとってもっとがっかり。 サイフに余裕があって何でも食べて栄養にしようと言う消化器のタフな人はこれらが将来何かに活かせる のかも知れません。私はどちらの内容も音楽的関心での接点はなかったのですが、本のデザイン/ポールクーパー、使っている紙質、印刷/中国、は抜群。現在この本は「私も出版する時はこんな仕上がりでいきたいなぁ。」とその見本サンプルとしての理由だけでまだとってあります。

great book.

Simply superb. Rooksby is without doubt the very best musical educator I've ever read. Each of his books is a goldmine, I have several! Learn how chord progressions work, get inspiration and a boost to your creativity. Fantastic.

Primarily,I play keyboard so this was a bonus to me.Getting to learn a few more tips about writing songs is never too much