David Sudnow began learning to piano in his thirties, while working as a college professor.
And he started, at once, to study the growth of improvisational skill in his own hands, taking voluminous field notes, recording and video taping thousands of hours of play. After five years of research, Harvard University Press published his now famous study, Ways of the Hand. It immediately received wide acclaim.

Sudnow showed, in detail, just how it makes sense to speak of "our hands learning". He
described how knowing the sounds of upcoming notes in an improvisation relates
to ways of moving around on familiar paths through the keyboard. He describes how the
pianist comes to "hear with his hands". And in the course of his analysis he uncovered many principles about learning.

His findings about the importance of aspects of timing and accuracy in rapid learning
laid a foundation for his piano seminar. It's one thing to say to students: practice perfectly
and practice on time. It's another to be able to carefully explain why this is so important.
Sudnow remains convinced that the more a student understands the nature of the skill being acquired, the more in command of the situation the one becomes. Sudnow dislikes instruction
that says: JUST DO IT THIS WAY BECAUSE I SAY SO. The Sudnow Method is concerned that you
grasp the underlying basis for a practice suggestion. Not just a rule. This is what he means
when he says he wants to make "you your own best teacher". So you're in for a practical
seminar of instruction that's informative and interesting at the same time.

When he decided to to offer a song playing seminar, his own studies of the development
of skills led him to develop not just a "music course" with all the facts about notes,
and scales, and chords - facts that are widely available - but a program for learning
based on principles about how the hands actually learn most effectively. He knew adults
needed to get gratification pretty quickly, and yet was suspicious of programs that promised overnight results. That's simply not possible. Not if you want to play adult sounding music.
The task was to create a sensible and also meaningful goal, and then devise the most
effective way to bring a newcomer's (and prior player's) hands to achieve it.

One of his suspicions was that many of the usual "exercise programs" teachers have
beginning students follow are as much designed to give teachers something new to say
each week, as they are really so important to the student's actual skill growth. The more
he taught adults how to play songs, the more he realized how important motivation was in
creating the best circumstances for rapid learning. And the more adult students he observed
the more it became clear that his approach of starting people on full blown arrangements
from the very start was a solid one, not only because it was based on close research about
learning, but took motivation into account as well. And instead of developing something
that's really vague, like "piano skills in general", you develop skills that are specifically for
the kind of music you want to play.

Again - you have a program that has been carefully designed and tested on a great many
students. It offers no gimmicks, or magic bullets. But it provides the clearest, and most
complete, straight spoken instruction on just how to teach yourself to play songs well.

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