Hacker News Books

40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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cjayboonApr 8, 2021

I've played both piano and guitar for over a decade, at what I'd consider to be a relatively advanced hobbyist level. I enjoy playing jazz, but I'm not so sure anyone would enjoy listening!

For me, lots of theory concepts "click" more easily on the piano. I think it's partially a visual thing -- on a keyboard things like intervals are visually apparent (how many keys are between these two notes), whereas it requires a bit more mental overhead to conceptualize the same things on a guitar fretboard.

I greatly prefer to discover and play around with new musical ideas on the keyboard first for this reason. Others' mileage may vary!

As far as resources go, I'm a fan of Mark Levin's "The Jazz Theory Book". It starts with basic theory then works through more advanced concepts.

lioetersonAug 26, 2019

This might depend on your personal preference and approach, but I like books with high information density, with pieces that I can chew on for a long time - even if much of it is beyond my understanding at the beginning (or even at the end). Here are some of my favorites:

The Jazz Theory Book (Mark Levine)

Huge series of play-along books by Jamey Aebersold

The Geometry of Musical Rhythm (Godfried Toussaint)

Harmony (Walter Piston)

A Geometry of Music - Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Dmitri Tymoczko)

Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (George Russell)

Augmented Scale Theory (Javier Arau)

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