Schaum’s Red book A is the second in the John Schaum Piano Course, designed to follow on from the previous fun book, developing your piano playing and musicianship.

Fun pieces and tips

Schaum’s Red book A is full of fun and easy pieces such as ‘Snug as a bug in a rug’, ‘Jumping beans’, ‘Tune of the tuna fish’ and ‘The Rodeo’ (approx. grade 1 standard), and loads of colourful illustrations. There are handy tips before each piece, including hand position charts and keyboard diagrams, and good warm-ups. This book introduces different hand positions, crescendos/diminuendos, the keys of D and Bb major, dotted 3/4 and 4/4 rhythms, more articulation, chords, broken chords, rhythmic development, and changing keys. The piano music is marked with fingerings, dynamics, articulation, pedalling, performance directions, and metronome marks.

Improve your musicianship

As well as playing, John Schaum’s Piano Course provides many other areas of musical training; it has sight-reading drills in the front, and additional areas of learning include how to transpose, stories about composers, finger training, phrasing, music appreciation, memorisation, how to count, intervals, scale writing, and even a musical trick! You are also gradually introduced to relevant theory information through the pieces.

Designed for teachers and pupils to work through together

Schaum’s Red Book is designed to work through in lessons with a teacher - it contains many tips and notes for the teacher, and preparatory drills in boxes for teachers to give you before new pieces. At the end of the book there are 2 fun piano quizzes for you to do before your teacher fills in the certificate promoting you to the next book in the course!

Contents (a-z)

• A Musical Trick
• A Nutty Song
• At the Ice Cream Counter
• Bells Are Ringing  (adapted from the Ninth Choral Symphony) - ­L.V. Beethoven
• Birthday Greetings
• Brahm’s Lullaby - J. Brahms
• Captain Silver - Jensen
• Crunchy Flakes
• Cycles
• Down a Coal Mine
• Hannah from Montana
• Jumping Beans
• Motorcycle Police
• Riding on a Mule
• Schubert’s Waltz
• Snug as a Bug in a Rug
• Steady Eddie
• Swinging along
• The Cheerleader
• The Dandy Lion
• The Escalator
• The Goofy Gopher
• The Kangarooster
• The Life Guard
• The Movies
• The Pet Shop - F. Schubert
• The Picnic
• The Rodeo
• The Snake Dance
• The Sphinx
• The Steam Iron
• The Woodchuck
• Tick-tack-toe
• Tune of the Tuna Fish
• Warm-ups
• Which is Witch?