Gospel Keyboard Styles: A Complete Guide to Harmony, Rhythm and Melody in Authentic Gospel Style

Harrison's book focuses on theory and patterns that can serve as a foundation for a gospel sound. I am self-taught at piano and I've found it helpful to get so many snippets and patterns that I can practice individually and then later build into complete songs. As an aside, I would not recommend this book if you are a beginner or if you are uncomfortable with theory terms like "dominant 7th" or "mixolidian mode." That said, you also do not need to be a PhD in theory to follow this: a basic understanding is enough to get started with all the patterns to practice. Lastly, as you can probably infer, for me this book is not about teaching you how to play a single specific song, but rather about teaching you the patterns and common practice sounds that you can use to create and embellish any gospel song.I should add that I am also starting to use Ethel Caffie-Austin's wonderful "Learn to Play Gospel" DVD at this time, and I am finding it really helpful to use both of these resources at once. The Harrison book gives me patterns and theory that I use for practice drills, and the Caffie-Austin DVD gives me a less theoretical approach with very beautiful playable songs. I have a feeling that if I keep working diligently with both of these for a few more months, I might be able to play Gospel the way I really want to.

This book was a lot harder than I expected, would have been nice if I could have been able to view some of the inside pages before I bought it.

These lessons are found lacking when compared to other Gospel Piano lesson books. It pales in comparison to Kurt Cowling's "Gospel Piano" (which I rated as 5 stars).Mark Harrison's book doesn't really deliver on its front-cover claim "A Complete Guide to Harmony, Rhythm And Melody in Authentic Gospel Style".I'm sure Mark is a great player, but not enough time was put into this book, or he just underestimated his audience. The theory is mostly basic, there are no audio files for the music (even us readers want the audio), and it's often missing the explanation of why a chord was voiced in it's context (surrounding chords).Sorry, but I probably would not recommend this as the book to buy to study gospel style piano.

This book is a great starting point for R & B, and related key board players. The material is straight forward and takes the reader through the steps of organizing an excellent progression. I recommend this book for producers, song writers and people beginning in the gossiple style playing in churches.

To practice music.

This book addresses a need for giving me understanding of a piano style that I wish to develop, and it looks like it will be a big help, but I find that the Kindle version does not make it easy to apply it to the keyboard like a hard copy would, so I am ordering the hard copy. It would have been nice to be able to print out practice pages through my PCKindle, but didn't see how that could be done. I love my Kindle and have several books on it, but this is one type of book that needs to be a hold-in-your-hand paper version. Ditto for cookbooks, I find.

I purchased this book (which I basically like) and then later purchased "The Pop Piano Book" by the same author. I was annoyed to find that this book is copied verbatim - every word, every example - as chapters 17 and 18 in the larger book. I would assume this is the case with some of the other single-genre books as well.If you think you're going to want to buy a couple of these Hal Leonard piano styles books, I'd suggest just getting the Pop book instead.

As with the "Chord Approach to Pop Playing" even though I am familiar with the 12 major chords I am going to need a professional musician to walk me through it. Am looking forward to completing this book.

A very good technical book, goes in depth into the chord structures. It would have been a five star rating had there been some samples of songs using the methods illustrated. Overall very challenging.

Not what I expected I would like to return it back

Exactly what I wanted

well written (didactic, so good for beginners)2 main chapters: it starts with the slow gospel and then the fast gospel