100 Ultimate Blues Riffs for Piano/Keyboards, the Beginner Series

Book excerpt: 100 Ultimate Blues Riffs for Piano/Keyboards, the Beginner Series by musician, educator and world renowned author Andrew D. Gordon is an exhaustive guide to introduce beginner students to the various phrases or “riffs” that make up Blues piano playing, both from a rhythmic and soloing standpoint. Due to the continued success of his more advanced book 100 Ultimate Blues Riffs for Piano/Keyboards Andrew decided to author a similar type of book for beginner students. This book is ideal for the beginner to intermediate music student with most of the examples notated in the easier keys. Besides learning how to play Blues riffs the book is a useful tool for sight reading exercises with many different left and right hand rhythms. The 12 bar Blues progression and the Blues scale, in Andrew’s opinion, the two most important aspects of playing the Blues is explained in detail as well as “straight” and “swing” rhythms. There are five sections to the riffs in the book, section 1 contains basic Blues riffs, section 2 contains Rhythm & Blues influenced riffs, section 3 contains Boogie Woogie riffs, section 4 contains Rock influenced Blues riffs and section 5 contains Gospel influenced Blues riffs. Included with this book is are audio files that contains all the riffs, recorded twice: first, piano with bass and drums and second just bass & drums so you can play-a-long.