Big Book of Beginner's Piano Classics: 83 Favorite Pieces in Easy Piano Arrangements (Book & Downloadable MP3) Paperback – June 11, 2008

This book is an excellent choice to use along with a beginner 1 level piano student. They have have a selection of actual songs they can play and it will encourage them to continue their piano learning and to practice.The book has excellent selections for the beginner student. It's good to use a book such as this with your beginner student to encourage them with music other than the somewhat simple songs given in their study materials. I highly recommend this book to be used with other piano study materials. I like this book a lot.

These are arrangements that retain the melody yet not the complexity. Although I would rather I could play the actual composers scores, I cannot, so I have been buying "easy" arrangements in book form - mostly to get Chopin. I have returned to my piano after many years of just sporadic playing, and my hands are not able to do what they did when I was young. I did take many years of lessons but regrettably I was not very in love with practice, although I am in love with piano, especially Chopin. SO - to just enjoy the music this was one of the books I bought. The MP3s mean you CAN hear how the music should sound, and they are a nice resource to have.This book is perhaps TOO easy for my level - whatever my level is. I think maybe low to middle intermediate at this point. Not going to get better now, but I want to play, so faced reality. The book I like best is Simply Chopin. It is a little more advanced, and the arrangements are more full bodied. I did buy a couple more, and its all good - all nice to play, but Simply Chopin will be my book for awhile now. :)https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073904480X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I am an adult (late 30's) and had piano lessons when I was a kid. I was never a virtuoso, but could play Moonlight Sonata, or Fur Elise up until it gets hard. After many years of not having a piano in my life I finally do again, and am terribly, terribly out of practice. This book is perfect for me. It's grown-up music, simplified to a point where I look at the music and think, "I'll need to practice a little while to be able to play that perfectly, but I can totally get there." Which is exactly what I want in a book of sheet music designed for learning.I see some debate (of sorts) in the reviews as to whether this is a "beginning" book or not. I would say yes, it is a beginning level book, but towards the advanced end of "beginning." It is a book for practicing skills you already have learned or are learning elsewhere, rather than a teaching book. I'm only a little way into it, but so far it has chords in both hands, melodies moving from clef to clef, cross-over fingering, and timing as complex as triplet eighth notes but not much more complicated than that. Many but not all pieces have fingering suggestions. From what I've tried so far, most pieces seem to be 1-3 pages long, most often 2 or 3 pages. I've seen up to 4 flats or sharps.My one complaint is the way the book is organized. It's simply alphabetical by composer. Very easy for them to put together, I'm sure, but it could have been better organized to better help the learner. A rough order of easy to difficult would have been useful, or grouped for some sort of lesson, e.g. unusual time signatures or challenging keys. I think either of those methods of organization would make the book more useful--it's obviously aimed at learners so why not help them out a bit more and steer them toward pieces that will help them with whatever it is they'd like to learn, or whatever part of the difficulty spectrum is the best level of challenge.With the organization as it is, I'm just kind of working through alphabetically, practicing the ones that look interesting and doable for as long as I feel like it, and moving on. When I've gotten a look at everything in it I'll probably choose a few to focus on and actually practice until I can play them well. If they were organized by difficulty level, it would be much easier to hone in on the best ones for me to practice.

Perfect classical book for intermediate piano students.

This is great. I haven't played classical music for years, and wanted to get started again. Since it has been so long since I did, I got this book to help me start on a small scale and work up to what I, hopefully, once was. This seems to work well and I remember a lot of these master's music. Very easy start to either beginning or getting back into this kind of music.

You get sheet music and can download audio files so you get a lot of stuff to learn for the money with this book. I just finished level one of the Faber Accelerated Piano Adventures for the Older Beginner method books and started playing the first tune in this book this weekend. I think you probably want to be near the end of method book 1 in whatever series you are using before you try this book. The right hand part was easy enough and so was the left hand part. The trick is going to be playing them well both at the same time! I'm thinking a wek of work and I'll be ready to move on to song #2. I'll stop back later to edit if my view changes but after flipping through the book and learning the first piece it looks like this book is a good fit for me and may be a good fit for someone who has finished book one of a method book series. As my lessons continue these pieces will hopefully be easier and easier to learn but right now they are doable with a little work. The book does not look "easy" to me but it is not "too hard" either. Hopefully by the end of this book I'l be breezing my way through these song but right now they are going to take some time to get them right.

Easy. Two-thirds of the music in this book is known. I give it three stars as some of the most beautiful pieces have only one page and should have been two pages to capture the climax of the piece.