"The Latin Real Easy Book" just released!

After about two years of work, we have finally finished a great new fake book - "The Latin Real Easy Book." This is the fourth in our "Real Easy" series of fake books designed for classroom use, with educational material tailored for each tune as part of the chart. But this volume features exclusively great Latin jazz, salsa classics and Brazilian music. A wonderful feature is that we have audio files for every tune in the book on "The Latin Real Easy Book" page at shermusic.com so you can hear the songs. Some gorgeous music is there and I hope all you jazz fans out there will take the time to explore the songs we've presented.

It's hard to know what is more beautiful - Ivan Lins' scrumptious melodies, Tito Puente's slamming version of Chucho Valdes' "Triton," or Tito Rodriguez' soulful rendition of "Si Te Contara," just to name a few. All of the composers have contributed to making the world a better place because of their artistic creations--- and we hope that you will enjoy the book and pass along their message of positive energy by adding these tunes to your band's repertoire. Have fun! - Chuck Sher

Sher Music ebooks released!

Sher Music Co. has just released digital, ebook versions of 16 of our best-selling books, for use with the iPad, Kindle and other digital readers. Books released include Mark Levine's classic works, "The Jazz Piano Book" and "The Jazz Theory Book", as well as "The Salsa Guidebook" by Rebeca Mauleon, "The Brazilian Guitar Book" by Nelson Faria, "The Serious Jazz Practice Book" by Barry Finnerty, and many more. For a complete list of titles and outlets where they can be purchased, please see http://www.shermusic.com/new/digital_books.shtml.

The iPad versions feature some cool capabilities, like being able to click on a chapter in the Table Of Contents and be instantaneously taken there, or being able to search for a word and have a list of all the pages in the book including that term appear for you to check out, etc.

The Digital Real Book itself, including about 650 songs from all our fake books, is now downloadable to your iPad as well. Keep an eye out for more digital releases later in the year. Enjoy! - Chuck Sher

2 New Sher Music Co. books

We are happy to release two new books at the beginning of 2011 and hope you find them to be useful in your pursuit of beauty.

The first one is "Essential Grooves For Writing, Performing and Producing Contemporary Music." This was written by three Berklee College of Music professors, Dan Moretti, Matthew Nicholl and Oscar Stagnaro and is a very useful document if you have the need for templates of a bunch of different styles of music—from soul to jazz to hip hop to Afro-Cuban to reggae, and more. Each groove has all the rhythm section parts written out for a sample of the style, as well as some cogent historical background. Then there is an audio CD so you can hear what the groove sounds like and a multi-track DVD with each member of the rhythm section isolated so you can loop the bass part, create your own play-alongs, etc. Lots of uses, especially for arrangers, producers and writers of contemporary music. All for only $24.

The second one is "Three-Note Voicings and Beyond" by veteran guitarist Randy Vincent. This book has the best endorsements of any book we have ever published—from Pat Metheny, Jim Hall, Mike Stern, Ben Monder, etc. And their praises are certainly well-deserved. This is the second book Randy has written for Sher Music Co. and he is already deep into the third one. This series of books will become the new standard reference books for guitarists for a long time to come. Randy is one of those rare birds (like Mark Levine) who is not only a great player, but also has the ability to clearly and thoroughly explain the nuts and bolts of how jazz players do what they do.

Lots cooking in the Sher Music world for release later this year: legal downloads of 16 of our best-selling instructional books, an amazing selection of tunes in The Latin Real Easy Book, a new jazz harmony book from David Berkman, and more. Just send your email address to shermuse@sonic.net and we'll put you on our mailing list for notice of new releases as they happen. Thanks for supporting our high quality books and for letting people know that illegal, free downloads of our books is theft, plain and simple. Peace - Chuck Sher