The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

Hello out there in midiland,
	If you want to learn basic (and some not so basic) theory and to read
music get this book!!! "HOW TO PLAY PIANO DESPITE YEARS OF LESSONS," by
Ward Cannel and Fred Marx.  It is THE BEST book on this topic I have
ever seen.  If you read it, you WILL learn some useful stuff.  
	Most theory books are utter garbage - Expensive for what you get,
confusing, miserably boring and obtuse as hell. Think Casio PD synth
manuals... This book is actually fun to read.  I wouldn't have believed
this if somebody else had written it, but it is the truth.  I found
myself reading a chapter and then experimenting with what I had learned.
The key point here is I actually DID learn something useful!  It is the
ONLY time I have had that experience with a book on "Theory."  The guys
who wrote this are totally coming out of left field, but it is logical
and written in plain English.  I can't recommend this book too highly. 
Brilliant piece of work.  IN the introduction Norman Lloyd writes, "This
is a subversive book."  It is :)  Plus, it is all there (well all I will
ever need).  You don't have to buy book 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to get it
all.  They cover the whole deal with humor, even.  It is written to help
you to write songs and play them and to be able to improvise based on a
basic skeleton of a song.  It has forty some pages of songs in the back
to practice on.  They are lame, but what do you expect... They had to
find stuff that didn't cost a fortune to use in a book.  It won't teach
you cutting edge synth programing or give you the skill to play
Beethoven, but it's great for what it is. And if you read it, you will
have the basics you need to play Beethoven.  All you'll need after that
is practice... Worth way more than it costs.  This is THE book!  
	I think being able to read music helps a whole lot.  For writing modern
pop songs it is not really that necessary, clearly. Learn your basic
chords and you are mostly there. If you want to write scores for film or
do some deep, complex stuff, you owe it to yourself to tackle the job of
reading music..  So, I think it really depends on what you want to get
out of it.  Learning to read music isn't easy any way you look at it,
but it can be very rewarding and you will never know how much unless you
learn.  

	My two cents...   
				Warren ^=-=^