I have been a piano teacher for a few decades now and I have seen a lot of piano books for beginners. I like to check out what is available at least on an annual basis because there may be a better piano course than the one I have been teaching from for years. Yes, I definitely have a favorite and I would say that more than ninety percent of my students have used this particular series of book to at least get the fundamentals. Once the fundamentals are well known, then I have used a huge variety of books, obviously dependant on what the student wants to learn and achieve.
The piano book I use with the vast majority of my beginners is called The Alfred d’Auberge Piano Course Book 1. The reason that I have mostly used this book over many years is because I think it is the best beginner’s piano book I have ever seen, even though it was originally published in the 1960’s.
The reason why I prefer this beginner’s piano book is because I think it is the most logical and sequential piano book I have ever seen. I think it is great how it introduces reading music from the very first pages, but only with three notes so it is manageable for a beginner to learn. It allows a piano student to get comfortable with something new before it introduces another new concept. I think it has a good mix of well known tunes (to help students feel as if they are playing real music) and unknown tunes (to help a student to rely on interpreting the written notation, rather than just repeating what they hear).
Another feature that I really like (I have seen this feature in other beginner’s piano books) is where there is a diagram at the top of some of the pages that name the notes and show where to find them on the piano. I think that this feature helps a piano student learn what the notes look like, what they are called and where to find them on a piano. Also I think it’s a huge positive that the names of the notes are not just written in right underneath each note.
I could go on about how much I would recommend The Alfred d’Auberge Piano Course Book 1, but I think it would be more useful to explain what I don’t like about this particular beginner’s piano book. I don’t like that it just uses the American terms of quarter note, half note etc. I would prefer if it had the more universal terms of crochets, quavers etc. Having said this, it is easy enough for me to manually write in the more universal terms and then that way my students are learning both sets of terminology.
I also don’t like the inclusion of a piece called Swiss Song. In my experience, having a piece of music where the left hand is crossed over the right hand for the entirety of the piece is unnecessary and just causes confusion for the student. To fix this problem I just get my students to skip this one (although some of my students relish the challenge of learning it and I would never discourage anyone from having a go).
The last negative is no big deal. The book is in black and white (while the other publications are in color) and they have cute pictures scattered throughout to appeal to kids. Obviously adults would prefer that those pictures were not there, but most of my adult students learn to mentally block them out after a while anyhow.
I know that there are plenty of good quality beginner piano course books on the market as well as some that are quite frankly terrible and I would never teach from, but The Alfred d’Auberge Piano Course Book 1 has been my favorite for many years. It will be interesting if I ever found something that was better…