Latin Frequency

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