Rikky Rooksby ("real name, real spelling", he insists) is an Oxford educator who moonlights an extremely prolific author of musical how-to books. I reviewed his books several times for Blogcritics; perhaps his most popular title is How To Write Songs On Guitar from 2000. He's since taken he knowledge gleaned about songwriting while authoring that title and written a similar work for keyboard players.

How To Write Songs On Keyboards is Rikky's newest work, and like its predecessor, it walks the musician through all aspects of songwriting, from structuring chords to crafting a melody line, to the basics of lyric writing. Similar to his previous book, Rooksby assumes that you don't know how to read music notation, using a system similar to guitar tablature to show the reader where to place his fingers on the keyboard to form the various chords which make up the bulk of pop and rock music's vocabulary. Thus, in addition to keyboardists who want learn songwriting, Rooksby's book doubles as an excellent guide for the guitarist or bassist who wants to add expand his range of instruments, by learning the rudiments of the keyboard. (The book also comes bundled with a CD sonically illustrating all of its examples.)

Could Better Explore Keyboards' Sonic Variety

If there's one disappointment with the book, I wish Rooksby had gone more into the unlimited sounds that a keyboardist has access to. While the guitar is capable of all sorts of wonderful tonal variations, the majority of its sounds in rock boil down to clean and distorted electric, and the acoustic steel and nylon-strung guitar. In contrast, a keyboard player armed with a decent synthesizer (hardware or software) can sound like anything--which, needless to say, radically impacts songwriting. (Which is one of many reasons that songs written by, say, Peter Gabriel, sounds radically different from those drafted by Little Richard, even though both can put "Rock & Roll Keyboardist" on their business cards.) But given Rikky's copious output, hopefully a book whose title is "Songwriting For Synthesizer Players" will soon be forthcoming.

The bottom-line? How To Write Songs On Keyboards is an extremely well-researched look the history of rock, pop, and soul music, its chords and melodies, and how those notes fit on the musical keyboard. Careful reading of Rooksby's book would benefit any keyboardist interested in making music to support a vocalist, as well as learning how to best structure a tune.