How can you learn
to play from a CD?
Don't you need a
teacher?
|
When learning classical music to a certain level of perfection, you need close guidance on proper technique. Usually this is done hands-on. But if you're an adult who can't devote what it takes to learn classical music well, sophisticated song playing (in any style) is a far more attractive goal. It can be attained by any novice adult with reasonable amounts of practice. And it's easily self-taught. There are simple rules to 'the game' of 'song playing'. There are rules for playing songs well. With expert advice on how to practice efficiently, you don't need somone watching your progress. The music speaks for itself. If you need "regular lessons" to keep up motivation, extensive research shows you probably won't stick it out for long. If your desire is strong, all you need are the relevant facts, with clear and complete advice on how to apply them and why. That's not easy to find, especially when it comes to "popular song playing". But you'll find it all in The Sudnow Method. Concise, complete, and clear. The rest is really up to you. |
I have absolutely no background at all.
Is this for me? |
This Method is for anyone who wants to play songs well. No training is presumed. We start from the beginning. Students with prior lessons must now learn to think about the keyboard in a rather different way, to learn about chords, and playing by ear. We all start from scratch. Whether you can play a Bach Fugue or don't know Middle C from a hole in the ground - it doesn't matter. |
| I'm studying classical music now. Will this interfere? |
Not at all. Each helps the other. Classical skills have a payoff here, and your chord handling helps your classical playing. Everything you do in music is related, and nothing you're taught by this program has a bad impact on other styles of play, or vice versa. |
Is there a minimum
age requirement? |
No. But the CDs are directed to an adult audience. To use the program with younger children (under 14), an adult must work through it with them. Some minor adjustments for hand size are needed. We can give detailed guidance for using the course with youngsters, through lots of experience with parents who've worked with their children. |
What kind of music
will I make? |
You'll play anything you'd call a "song", with a melody and chords. It can be a tune out of the rock tradition, folk, country, pop, standards, jazz - from The Tennessee Waltz to Elinor Rigby, Amazing Grace to Over the Rainbow, The Christmas Song to Summertime. If you can hum it you can play it. You won't learn a Concerto or Sonata - these are written forms. You'll play songs - any "standards" over the past seventy five years - and you'll play them well. In this course you start on some well known tunes, like "Misty", "As Time Goes By", "Over the Rainbow". Here you learn to handle songs well. And from that point you can learn to play any song in any style you like. |
How can I start on
a full arrangement
if I can't play at all? |
Most music consists of melodies and accompanying chords. There are different ways to picture chords - groups of notes sounded at one time. You can write them out on a regular musical staff, those lines with little dots on them. You get a notation that's played in one and only one way. An alternative is to use the ancient language of chord symbols, which gives the same information but leaves the arrangement of chords and melody up to the performer. All great composers worked with "chord symbols' and "chord charts'. Then a particular arrangment got written down as "a scored version". When you play songs you use chord symbols and learn to arrange chords in many ways. Each time you play a tune you can vary it. That's why when you play by ear (chord patterns!) you're not lost if you "leave your music at home", the biggest complaint of people who can only read notation.
And there are easy ways to diagram chords without the musical staff. The Sudnow Method uses pictures of dots on piano keyboards to diagram first songs (in a way whose results many professional musicians have commended!). Still, these "dots" are temporary, soon replaced by using only chord symbols. But the diagrams have the great advantage of enabling a complete novice to learn a rich two-handed arrangement from the start. You get your hands on really wonderful sounds from the first day you begin. And learning full blown arrangements leads to a great deal of adult piano skill in a straightforward way. |
Do I have to
practice scales? |
The major scale (and really only that one!) is the basis for nearly all of the music we would say falls within "the popular realm" - all the songs that we each sing from one generation to the next. It has gotten a terrible reputation, because of the image of endless drills going up and down the piano. When you learn to play by ear - which is really "playing by chord patterns" - you have to learn to visualize major scales well: chords are built using tones of this scale; coloration is added by choosing notes in terms of the scale. So it's a foundation. You'll spend only a little time actually practicing the scale, because making the music itself teaches you the needed manual techniques. But you will do lots of looking at scales, taking these notes and putting them here, and those and putting them there. This is usually a new experience for people who have traditional piano educations. But it's a central part of being able to work with chords easily. Yes, you'll learn scales. But no, you won't play them in the usual exercising way, at least not very much at all. The Sudnow Method is big on learning everything in the context of the song you're learning, and not big at all on the idea of preparing for something by working first on something else. |
How long will it take
to get decent? |
That depends on the care with which you practice, more than the amount of time put in. "Caretaking' is discussed in detail in the seminar, in practical terms. Very clear guidance is given on a proven way to increase the rate at which you learn new things at the instrument. Those with significant prior experience will often grow faster than beginners. The average newcomer will have a repertoire of a half dozen tunes, played with truly professional sounds, in six to eight months. Within a year a novice can perform at a party. Students with any good prior study may get there twice as fast or faster. In either case, it's just a couple of months, at the most, before you're playing your first tunes in a way that will really amaze others! |
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