Learning to Play Latin Music on the Keyboards

Having been interested in Latin-American Music for quite a few years through dancing, I started to learn how to play Salsa on keyboards from a Cuban teacher. Unfortunately before getting too far, I ended up moving away and then I searched everywhere I could for instructional material on how to play. After a lot of hunting I learned that the latin players „bible“ was a book by Rebeca Mauleon, called „Salsa Guidebook“. This is a great book teaching all of the rhythms on keyboards, bass and all the percussion instruments, but it wasn’t enough to really get me started playing salsa, simply because it doesn’t specialize in just the keyboard part. About a year ago, I came across a site www.jampr.com, that sells sheet music and so I ordered some, just to see if they had any of the piano parts written out in full. It turned out to be just chord sheets, but when I asked the owner of the site about how to learn the montuno patterns, he pointed out that they also sold their own books on learning to play salsa and another for merengue. They have a great way of selling as well, you just pay by credit card and can download and print the book in pdf format immediately! Having had that success, I decided to trawl the internet once again just in-case any more books had come into print and I struck gold. There are now two books by Carlos Campos, who is a teacher at the Berklee School of music in the States, one of them is called „Salsa and Afro Cuban Montunos for Piano“ and the other is „Salsa, further adventures …“. The second book even has complete piano parts written out for a few of the standards like „La Negra Tomasa“ and „Moliendo Cafe“. Not only that, but I came across Rebeca Mauleon’s second book „101 Montunos“. By a strange coincidence, just a few months after I started doing an hour a day’s practice montuno playing, a friend who plays in a salsa band, told me that they needed a keyboard player, so now I’m in the band. That’s us on www.soncaribe.net. I had forgotten just how good it feels to play live, especially when it’s a music that you love! Que vive la salsa!