piano accompaniment

[anagarcia]

Hello,
I’m trying to learn how to play piano accompaniment while I sing. I know how to play classical piano and some blues, but I can’t find a book on piano accompaniment for pop, rock… (with advices like: don’t play the melody, play chords on the right hand…). Does anybody know a book about this or has some advices? How do piano accompanists learn to accompany?
Cheers,
Ana

[indianajo]

Download or buy a fake book. They contain songs with lyrics with a set of chords to play.  You can download the django fakebook from the gallery at organforum.com if you are a member. It is not very good but free.  I've heard the Berkeley conservatory "Real fake book" is pretty good, at least through edition 4, but the music stores are selling edition 6 or seven now published by Hal Leonard.   I'll lay money that HL has replaced some expensive Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer songs with "There is a House in New Orleans" and "Tom Dooley" which are public domain.  Those two songs are in every fake book I've found at the flea market or in benches of old organs I have bought.  
If you live in the USA, there is a PBS afternoon show that shows some tricks of making up arrangements of songs with lyrics.  It is titled the PIano Guy.  I'm trying to learn some of that stuff, but right now I am just playing the chords in root or an inversion and singing, just a few songs.  That is hard enough for me, right now.
If you can stand "the blues", the chord progressions are pretty standard and a good way to start out. Sort of the way the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac learned their basics playing "skiffle" (old folk songs) in the UK in the early sixties.  If you absolulely can't find anything else, get a guitar basics book.  They are fairly oriented to chords under a melody line, and is the way I started playing pop by ear, actually.  Seven years of   piano lessons did nothing for hearing the chord progression of a song, it left me playing those terrible arrangements of pop songs they used to sell at the music store.  fiddling with guitar a year or two helped me hear the chords, and now I am back to piano and electric organ which don't make my fingers bleed.