Jerald Simon

Essential Piano Exercises provides an encyclopedic coverage of major and minor scales, chords, triads, inversions, and progressions, supplemented with some introductory content, exercises, a few “cool” songs, and a smattering of arpeggios. Two-thirds of the content is devoted to writing out all the major and minor key scales and chords. As a teaching manual, this would be most useful in promoting rote memorization. The design is not conducive to helping students gain insight into the show more innate structure scales and learning to apply their knowledge to new scales and chords.

The massive content would be more useful if the author provided a detailed table of contents and a carefully constructed index. The bare-bones table of content is surrounded by text and squeezed against the inside margin, making the minimal content even less helpful than it could have been. No index is provided. Consequently, users need to search through the book to find the information they seek.

This book best suits students and musicians looking for a comprehensive reference. show less