Schaum’s Blue Book B is the third in the progressive John Schaum Piano Course, which is designed to improve your piano playing while also developing your musicianship.

Good tutor book for after grade 1

The Blue Book contains pieces by some famous classical composers such as Mozart, J.S Bach and some fun Schaum originals such as ‘Monkey see! Monkey does!’, ‘The spider dance’, and ‘The country fiddler’, arranged for an advanced grade 1 standard, so suitable for players between grades 1 and 2. This book is full of colourful illustrations, and tip boxes before each piece mean you are taught in bite-size chunks so that you can practise each concept with a short piece before moving on. Schaum’s Piano Course B introduces you to syncopation in 3/4 and 4/4, shifting melody between hands, 6/8, keys of Bb, Eb, and E major, chromatic songs, changing from major to minor, crossing hands, semiquavers, chord inversions, pedalling, and other notations such as repeat signs. The easy piano music is marked with fingerings, dynamics, articulation, pedalling, performance directions and metronome marks.

Musicianship and theory

Each piece in Schaum’s Blue Book B has a space to fill in the meaning of all the performance directions and musical terms for that piece, which helps you learn important Italian terms - use the musical dictionary in the back of the book to help you fill them in. Schaum’s Blue Book B also aims to improve your musicianship with tips on how to practise, musical appreciation, and stories about composers and pieces, and contains some sight-reading drills. 2 piano quizzes will test your theory and musicianship, and when you have completed them you can fill in the ‘Certificate of Promotion’ and move onto the next book in the series!

Contents (a-z)

• A Fine State of Affairs - Duvernoy
• Hear Those Lovely Bells
• Here We Go for a Touch Down
• Little Brown Bug
• Magic Flute - W.A. Mozart
• Monkey See! Monkey Does!
• Music Box - Liadow
• On the Levee (Old American Song)
• Over The Hurdles
• Play Ball
• Putting Salt on a Bird’s Tail or How Not to Catch a Bird
• Sailing (Old Song of the Sea)
• Shadown Pictures
• Short’nin’ Bread (Old Southern Song)
• Stalactites and Stalagmites
• Strange Lands - R. Schumann
• The Campbells are Coming
• The Clothes Line Waltz
• The Country Fiddler (Old English Morris Dance)
• The Daily Comics
• The Dentist
• The Dress Parade (adapted from ‘March Militaire’) - F. Schubert
• The Elevator
• The Fire Engine
• The Hair Stylist - Le Couppey
• The Harpsichord Player  - J.S. Bach
• The Spider Dance (Tarantella)
• The Telegraph Operator
• The Ventriloquist and His Dummy
• The Wishbone
• The Year 1620 (Old Netherlands Folk Song)
• Wu Long Pan (Famous Chinese Detective)