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Hi all,
Markham (David) has done a fine job with this site and I agree that support to keep things going is a worthwhile investment. There are lots of piano courses popping up all over these days, so the Sudnow method has become just a small voice among many. To put perspective on it, I don’t think The Beatles would have made the splash they did back then, if they had come into existence now because there is just so much else going on. When David Sudnow introduced his course, he was about the only game in town, but now, everybody is hawking something, usually not as effective a course of study.
Anyway, on to the fakebooks. Glen Rose (another cocktail piano guy, and long time pro player) and I have been exchanging emails since I did purchase some of his video lessons. I told him about the Sudnow method and he took a look. Here is a guy who takes a dim view of the “learn overnight” approaches of so many methods. His take on Sudnow in his own words…”Sudnow is spot on”. He felt that Sudnow’s voicing rules, as per the email discussions are exactly right. So there ya go. 🙂
Glen recommended several fakebooks that he said the pro cocktail piano folks use these days (in no particular order):
The Frank Mantooth series “The Best Changes To The World’s Greatest Standards”, etc. You can find them at Amazon.
There is also a two-volume set called “Pro Chord Changes” by Frank Mantooth from Hal Leonard that I believe are still in print.
The 4 book series from Hal Leonard “The Real Book Vol … For High Voice”. These have lyrics and have far more of the tunes most people who like cocktail piano music know and want to hear, rather than the large assortment of obscure jazz jam session tunes that the other Real Books have. He feels that knowing the lyrics is important to understanding what the tune is about.
“The Blue Book”. This is quite expensive at $125, and can only be gotten from an Oakland, CA pro sax player because the guy himself put the book together and publishes it. There are 768 tunes in it, all good, and all gig worthy. Check it out at nightbirdmusic.com. I did get the book, and think that if you consider how many hours it took to determine the election of tunes, the correct chord changes, the page layout, etc., all done by one guy, it is worthwhile to support his efforts. It is a useful book.
Oddly, he didn’t mention the Dick Hyman books (100 tunes…), though Sudnow did later on when they became available. I don’t know if these are still in print, but they are worth hunting down. There are two in the series.
Another series that I would recommend because they are so much like those of Frank Mantooth are from Champ Champagne. There are a bunch of these, but I don’t know which are (if any) still in print. You can google for them, and check out abebooks.com to find them used.
Personally, I don’t like to buy fakebooks used because I don’t want other people’s markings in them confusing me. I would rather mark them up with my own Sudnow fractions.
I prefer having a decent selection of fakebooks because I can compare the chord changes for the same tune between books.
Regarding fakebooks, Glen told me that most players use them, and few (if any) go strictly by ear. They learn the tunes well enough to often not need to take the books on gigs, but that is up to the individual player. The “by ear” part is usually having a large vocabulary of techniques to make the tunes interesting, and being able to apply these at will. When my wife and I went on a cruise back around 2000, I remember hanging out with the cocktail piano player. He had his pile of fakebooks and used them on the job. I asked him to give me lessons and offered to pay whatever the going rate was, but he kindly declined. We did have interesting conversation though.
Finally, a rather “long shot” recommendation is a book by guitarist and friend of mine, Robert Conti called “The Formula”. Though it is written for guitar players, he told me that quite a few keyboard players are using it too. Rather than memorizing a bunch of arcane rules for chord substitutions (other than a few of the more common such as tritone substitutions, he uses the bass line to drive the harmony by treating the bass note always as the root. The book then focuses on common bass line movements and the harmonies you can infer from that. He will provide a few measures of a known melody and then give you 5 or 6 different ways to harmonize it by changing the flow of the bass line under the melody. In forums, several of the schooled jazz guitar players have said that he has captured years of study in harmony with this book, but in a very practical and immediately useful manner. You can get the book at: https://www.robertconti.com/product/the-formula. The book comes with 2 DVDs to walk you through it and really explain how to do it.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful, and again…many thanks to Markham (or do they call you David around here?) for keeping the site up and the method alive.
Tony
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Be careful of the nightbirdmusic site – Google (and my virus software) think it has been hacked.
The Frank Mantooth books have been republished by Hal Leonard as ‘Pro Chord Changes’ volumes 1 and 2. Between them are over 300 songs with great voicings. Hal Leonard also has a series of legal “Real Books” that have a larger collection of songs more specific to the jazz idiom. There is also a “Real Book” of Christmas songs (it’s snowing here today…). You can also find a nice Champ Champagne book of “Christmas Favorites”.
…’David’ or ‘Markham’ both work. :^)
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I told Jim (creator of Nightbirdmusic.com) about it being hacked and he said he would get on it. Apparently, he did because the last time I checked it, I didn’t get the warnings from my virus protection software. I don’t think he sells the book on his site, so you probably have to ask him directly via email. With all the other decent fakebooks around these days, I am not sure most folks would need to spend the extra money.
as for the Pro Chord Changes, I did mention them too:
“There is also a two-volume set called “Pro Chord Changes” by Frank Mantooth from Hal Leonard that I believe are still in print.” I didn’t realize they were essentially his older books, so thanks for that info.
Tony
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A few years ago the Mantooth books disappeared from the Hal Leonard site. Somehow I got an email address for his widow and discovered there was an effort underway to republish his work. I don’t know all the details but obviously the effort was successful – thankfully.
Good to have you on the forum again Tony.
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It is good to be back on the forum. It took some time to get back focused on the Sudnow method, but it comes back and things are going well.
There was one person on the piano forum that I recommended the Sudnow method to. He was asking about methods to learn essentially cocktail style piano, so I gave him my experience and comparisons to other methods that I have worked with. He posted later in the thread saying he had decided on the Sudnow method. I suggested he come here to this forum where everybody is focused on the same method for support, rather than a general forum such as piano world. I have not seen anybody new here yet though. I intend to stick around, and I post only rarely on piano world anymore. There i a lot of silliness there and people posting who don’t play at all, who pose as if they are actively playing.
I still have my Roland V-Grand and I personally like it much better than the newer lines Roland has come out with, though if I were on the market today, the LX-17 would be a fine choice, as I am sure some of the newer models would be too. I do think the digital piano has come into its own as an instrument, though I don’t see the point in expecting it to be an acoustic piano.
Tony
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Digital pianos are continuing to improve. Roland has been putting some of the technology used in my V-Grand and the V-Piano into their lower-priced products. A neighbor just bought a new Roland GP-607. I saw and played it this morning for the first time and thought it is quite nice. I played several standards in the “Sudnow” style and my neighbor thought I should set up a piano in our lobby. 🙂
There is a thread about the new Roland pianos at the piano world forum. I don’t post there much, but decided to today in this thread. People are discussing all manner of detail about these pianos, much of it guessing because they are simply not engineering employees of Roland and therefore can’t possibly know anything. My comment was that I suspect most of Roland’s customers couldn’t care less about all these real or imagined details, but instead just want a good piano experience, such as my neighbor now has.
How many people who buy Smart-TV flat screen TV’s know that these are really computers running the Linux operating system? What difference would that knowledge make to their viewing experience? One guy seemed angered by my assertion that most customers don’t care what goes on under the hood, and was challenging me saying that my post didn’t mean anything. He seemed offended that my neighbor bought an expensive digital piano. However, like acoustic pianos, with digital pianos, you do get what you pay for. No amount of wishing or pretending can get around this fact.
When I bought my V-Grand, I was looking for an immersive piano experience and that model was recommended to me by a real player, not an internet forum poser. The Roland model that my neighbor bought was recommended by his piano playing friends and not some internet poser. I have a cynical view of many of the people constantly posting in the digital piano sub-forum. Few are engineers and even fewer probably even play much themselves. The problem with the internet is that anybody can pose as whatever they want, yet still could be some 40 year old unemployed guy living in his mother’s basement. After a while, you can spot who the real decent people are though and avoid the rest.
If you want to learn about the current crop of digital pianos, regardless of brand, the only way I know of is to actually play them and determine what your response as a player is to each model you play. Today’s digital pianos have come far enough along that they are generally quite good and it is more a matter of what the individual player feels comfortable with, just as is true with an acoustic piano.
Forget about all the details of sound engines what goes into the keybeds, etc. If you stick with Yamaha and Roland, you will get a quality digital piano that will last many years. From what I have seen in forum discussions by owners of Kawai digital pianos, these tend to have more issues than do Roland and Yamaha, but people still do really like that brand too. There are other brands, but I am not really familiar with them and am not sure many outside of the “big three” are sold around town.
Tony
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