Reddit reviews The Hymn Fake Book: C Edition

If you just want a lot of hymns for reading, here is a great, free resource. If you ever find yourself subbing for churches or attend one, or even want to sub, you might get friendly with the music minister or accompanist and borrow a hymnal.

If you want to practice reading chords as in comping or faking from lead sheets, try this Hymn Fake Book. This is the resource I use most often when doing non-church specific gigs where they want religious music (mostly religiously affiliated retirement communities). It's great to just use the leads to make an interesting and upbeat version of a tune. People seem to love a lot of gospel tunes done up in a dixie way, but that's probably because I'm in the south.

Now, if you want to practice reading chords on the page, I'm really not sure a hymnal is the best option. I honesty find hymn pretty limiting in that the skills they teach as far as reading goes tends to be fairly tailored specifically toward playing hymns. I think a lot of people recommend them for sightreading practice because, well, that's the experience they had because they either took for a teacher who pushed that angle, or they found themselves having to play for churches a lot.

If you're goal is to improve overall sightreading and not specifically for church playing, you might want to take up another approach. If you could clarify what you want to accomplish, I might be able to suggest an approach that fits your needs a little better. It's not even that practicing sightreading hymns is bad, but I find that a lot of sightreading advice is pretty terrible. It comes from well meaning people, but since many of them started when they were very young, they tend to not remember how hard sightreading can be and over advice based on skills they take for granted in their own playing. I've been frustrated to no end over the years by people who didn't understand how bad my sightreading was immediately make suggestions like hymns, or even Chopin Nocturnes, or even Bach inventions for sightreading.