When our eyes deceive us...

[Gill the Piano]

Well if it's anything like Mission Praise , then it's incredibly badly arranged and therefore NOT easy to play. I think it was arranged by a guitarist who isn't really au fait with the piano/keyboard and just transcribes guitar chords. The unfortunate effect is that if I've had a skinful the night before and am not concentrating, I can find myself meandering into 'Magic Roundabout' when playing the organ...

[Moonlight]

Yeah done that too. Before I was grade 1 level I bought ' I can play that! Classical master pieces ' and when I got it home found the music to to way too hard for me then. Looking at the book now a lot of the pieces don't seem so hard, I might use some of the easier pieces in the book as sight reading soon, theres a nice arrangement from Percel's Dido and Aeneras 'when I am laid in earth' that is simple, has the vocals too.

[Gill the Piano]

It's NOT demon drink, it's NICE! Anyway if it's that bad for us they didn't ought to give it to us at Communion, did they?

[Gill the Piano]

Well today we didn't get ANY wine...apparently God loves us and protects us from all evils and perils of this world. Except swine floooo.

[markymark]

On Thursday I bought what I thought to be an easy book of praise and worship songs (I like to play p/w songs and hymns even though I'm not a Christian because they're simply constructed and nice and easy to play) It's called 'Children's Praise' from the Mission Praise series of contemporary church music and as its title suggests is squarely aimed at children of primary school age in Sunday schools/youth groups. In the shop it looked really easy, the sort of thing I could easily play, in the familiar and common keys and time sigs and nice cheery rhythm patterns.

So I gets it home and have a quick go at playing some songs from it on Thursday evening. Couldnt - found it was too bleeding difficultly way beyond my musical Ken when it looked so easy and a good sight reading test in the shop.

Has anybody elses eyes ever deceived them when buying music in a sheet music store I wonder?

The problem with Mission Praise arranging is that it is arranged for SATB in most cases and therefore sounds old-fashioned and "empty" for piano playing. I've often had to rearrange the music after playing it through a couple of time as is to see what is happening in the music.

However, there are some very simply arranged songs in there too!