Scale related stuff

That’s a great start Lee. Once you get through the rest of the seminar you’ll begin to see more of the theory at work – and one reason why the scale practice is so important. Enjoy.

Hi Lee. Yep, that was me. I don’t post often over at piano world, but I do scan the beginner’s forum periodically. I have several piano methods, but over the years have found that the Sudnow method makes the most sense for me. It is amazing how much you learn simply by following and doing what Sudnow recommends. I have studied much theory on my own, but it was Sudnow that gave me a perspective on it that made practical sense.

One big problem with self-study is that we are essentially the “blind leading the blind”, so we don’t know whether whatever it is we are focusing on will help get us where we want to go. It is impossible to take a “long view” when we don’t know the territory. A lot of methods try to skip over much to get us quickly playing something that sounds somewhat musical, while at the other end of the spectrum, some methods delve so deeply that we lose motivation.

With the Sudnow method, the difficult (for me, anyway) is the plodding from chord to chord, getting the shapes into my hands. It takes time before it starts to come together and sound musical. However, during that process, we are learning much more than we realize at the time. Unfortunately, many of us fall away before we reach that point. Suffice it to say that there is no easy way to learn piano, so we might as well settle in for the long haul with a method that we know ultimately works. They probably all work, so it is a matter of finding the one that addresses what we are interested in. There is not much sense in learning classical music if we want to play cocktail style. This is what Sudnow is addressing through his method, and I think you might have been the person who said he wanted to learn cocktail style piano at piano world. For that, the clear recommendation, in my opinion would be Sudnow.

The way I go through the scales, per the Sudnow method, s in 4ths: C, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, B, E, A, D, G. The reason I do that is because that is mostly how music moves. I learned that on guitar when I was working with the Johnny Smith method years ago. Sudnow says you can do it any way you want – just learn them, so I chose that approach because it really drills in the feeling of 4ths. Recite those “backwards” and you have the cycle of 5ths. To me, the cycle of 5ths is backwards, since that is not how music moves. Another jazz guitarist that really bases his entire approach on the cycle of 4ths is Robert Conti. There is musical precedence for this. Play through it, and your ears will readily recognize those movement because they hear them all the time in music.

The way I learned “Misty” was exactly as Sudnow described in his course: get one chord in hand by grabbing and removing my hands, grabbing again, etc. until I could just grab that chord. Then do the same with the next one, then with the first and second, etc. However, we all have different learning styles, so whatever works for you is what you should do, just as with the scales.

If anything, working through a method such as Sudnow is a journey of self-discovery as we find out how we each learn best and then personalize our approach to following Sudnow’s instructions.

Sudnow emphasized, in his early lessons, that getting together with other Sudnow students would go a long way to helping long term motivation – to stick with it long enough to start seeing the results of all the plodding along. I was always involved in study groups in college and it really helped me, as I also helped the others in the group. Some people went through alone and did just fine. As with everything else, we are all different. I would like to stay involved in this forum, and hope that there might be others who benefit from that involvement too.

Tony

The cycle of 5ths is interesting. I think it is presented that way because it is usually used to find the key signature of a key, and these increase in order around the cycle of 5ths. Ironically, going backwards yields how music really works by 4ths. 🙂

The thing about the Sudnow method, and probably why so many of us go away and come back again, is that it is, quite honestly, a bit of a slog compared to other methods. I think the reason is that you are learning a lot at once, rather than it being doled out in bite sized pieces as is done in other methods.

Many of us go away from the Sudnow method for a while and play around with other methods, and then come back. There are only two people I know of who stuck it out all the way, though I am sure there are more that I am not aware of. The two are David Haynes (who also took other piano lessons and studied other material, but always worked those in parallel instead of leaving the Sudnow method), and a woman over at the piano forum who called herself “Swingin’ Barb”. She, like David Haynes, plays very well in that style. I have not seen her around the piano forum in several years, so I don’t know what happened to her. At least there is proof that the method works if you stick with it. 🙂

Sudnow used to say that it is better to learn the whole thing at once, than to make simple, dumbed down versions of whatever it is you are learning, so that is what he did in his method. When slogging through a piece such as “Misty”, it can be difficult to bear in mind that you are learning a whole bunch of stuff at once. That only becomes apparent as you learn more tunes, slowly over time.

As for reading sheet music, I can do that on both piano and guitar. However, I find it frustratingly slow and much prefer to use my ear or the “shorthand” of a lead sheet, which demands different skills, such as knowing something about music so you can make your own interpretations. that is the skill you learn in the Sudnow method. Other methods teach that these days, but not in the same way that Sudnow does.

Tony

Hi Lee,
Just to clarify a few things…

I know that Tony didn’t intend to imply that only a couple of us have been successful with The Sudnow Method. The “Student Play” section of the web site showcases the playing of a number of Sudnow students. Over the years I’ve personally had contact with many more. David Sudnow, many more yet. Still, as Tony implies, and David used to remark, “It’s a big skill”, even in the small subset of piano playing that the Method addresses. It’s also true that what you’re encouraged to do isn’t particularly difficult but you do have to do it for an extended period of time with some care. The extent to which you apply that care is up to you. Everyone can set their own goals.

As an aside, in the “Advanced Resources” section of the web site is my own graphic rendition of the “circle of fourths”. It’s in the “Advanced” section not because it’s a particularly difficult concept but rather because it’s largely irrelevant to becoming competent with David’s method. It’s interesting to some people – including me – so indulge your curiosity if you’d like but don’t worry if you’re not interested.

Scales, within the Sudnow Method, are a different story. The circle of fourths/fifths is mostly about harmonic movement, not scales. Without getting too bogged down in theoretical considerations, if you’re playing major scales as a II, V, I exercise you’re playing the “wrong” scales anyway. One scale would do the job. Part of the brilliance of David’s Method is all the exceptions to the “rules” that are hidden within his insights. And you get permission to break them – after you learn them.

Sudnow spent a lot of time thinking deeply about how he wanted to present his teaching insights. He requested that you play all major scales with “proper” fingering and also with a single finger. Play them in whatever order you’d like. The purpose is to get the path of the scale into your hands and into your brain so you can easily “see” and find individual notes. You should be able to visualize all the major scale paths. Eventually to the point where if you’re thinking about the 3rd (or 9th or whatever) of the Eb major scale you immediately “see” a G. You can do this sort of practice without a keyboard in front of you (and it’s a valuable exercise).

The value of this particular knowledge of scale paths within the Method is not harmonic movement, it’s ease of voicing. In fact, as you begin to slog through writing your own voicing fractions (and it will be a slog for a while) this scale path visualization will improve out of necessity.

(One addendum I’ll make to David’s scale practice routine is that it’s also helpful to play scales through two octaves – not “required” but helpful from a keyboard geography perspective.)

As you acquire this skill you’ll eventually discover that you can begin to “read” lead sheets. At that point, working through LOTS of songs begins to build awareness of common harmonic devices without really thinking about it. And you’ll be able to look down at your chords and try different voicing options with some speed. If you decide to delve into David’s material on more advanced voicing and reharmonization the whole II,V,I thing becomes even hazier.

At the risk of continuing to drag this on longer than I intended, there are some accomplished students out there who never bothered to voice songs themselves. They just used David’s original books of dot songs (also in the Resources section) to build a repertoire of 20-30 great songs. To each his own.

So you do have some choices about where you want to go with all the resources Suds (and other people) created, but I’ve seen lots of students get distracted (I did it myself – sometimes still do) to the point where their effort never bears song-playing fruit. You’ll have to find that balance point yourself.

What I said (copied directly from my last response) was:

There are only two people I know of who stuck it out all the way, though I am sure there are more that I am not aware of.

So, no I didn’t imply anything other than exactly what I said. I have no idea how many of those who have posted in the student performance section are still with the course. Activity around here is minimal, so it is difficult to know. I know that you (David Haynes) is still active, and I know that Swingin’ Barb was at least active long enough to have followed Sudnow’s instructions for playing stride, which would imply that she was already versed in grabbing the clusters by having played enough tunes that way to be able to move on to the next level with stride. I would assume that was at least a couple of focused years.

As to practicing the scales, I am not sure where the ii V I came from about scales (it is always amazing to me how we veer off into these things), but I have Sudnow’s complete 12 tape course and I still listen to it periodically. In the section of the seminar where he talks about practicing scales, a student asks if he should learn them one at a time, or all 12 at once, and in what order. Sudnow’s response is that he doesn’t care how the student learns them – “just get them learned”. He then illustrates with a story:

Suppose I gave you (points at a student in the seminar) $10,000 if you learn the scales by the end of the weekend (the length of the seminar). That student would rush home and find a way to learn them, whatever it takes to do so.

Sudnow then said that if we all followed him home and watched him learn those scales, we would see how to do it, because “the motivated student is the best teacher”. Sudnow then said that the “teacher has forgotten what it is like to not know how to play the piano, he just knows how good it is to be able to do it”.

So, with that in mind, in my response in this thread about scales, I said that I chose to do them through the cycle of 4ths, and explained why. That is merely one person’s way of doing it. Everybody must find whatever means works for them, just as Sudnow said in that seminar.

I hope that clears things up a bit. I feel that my posts get long enough, so apparently I don’t go deep enough into explaining each thing. When I can see that I didn’t make something clear, I am perfectly willing (as I am doing here) to go back to that unclear area and try again to make it clear.

Tony

Tony – I don’t disagree. I knew what you were saying. Others may infer something different.

The II,V,I is just an extrapolation of what following the circle of fourths in sequence typically represents. My mistake for not recognizing my own assumptions.

Sorry.

So I’m getting back into the course. I’ve played a lot of songs using Suds voicings (you can hear some of them here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1RgxG2Y6Hs&list=PLfv62VT5n65tbsxCDyazC1ePXF7GebFST) but I never did scales like he apparently recommended. This talk about scales has made me want to go and practice scales his way. My question: I don’t see anything here on the site that describes how they should be practiced. Is it just as simple as “play all the major scales up and down for a few octaves”? What about minor (and what kind of minor, melodic/harmonic)? Modal (Dorian is one of my favorites, and certainly gets used a lot in jazz)?

Thanks for considering my dumb question. 🙂

Hi Gary,

Over the years I’ve done several riffs on the huge benefits of “dumb questions” – I’ll spare everyone another one.

As far as scale practice, you can go right to the horse’s mouth within the weekend seminar. Navigate to the seminar (under the “My Stuff” link at the top of the page) and click open the “How to Play Misty” list on the right side of the page. You’ll see several lessons where David talks about scales. None of the lessons are much over 10 minutes.

No problem, David. I just wanted to make sure there was no misinterpretation so people don’t get confused and possibly put off. As to ii V I, I have certainly played my share of those on the guitar in jazz groups, and when we play the standards, we can’t help but play a lot of those. 🙂

I don’t think Sudnow wanted us to go down that path until much later, so as to keep focused on getting the scales and those clusters into our hands.

Tony

All I know is that fish have scales, but now I find out pianos do to? Well, as REO Speedwagon said “you can tune a piano but you can’t tuna fish”! 🙂

Seriously, Sudnow sounded similar to Joe Pass about theory. Joe Pass (the famous jazz guitarist) taught that there was the major scale, and that everything else derived from that. He taught that there were three types of chords: major, minor, and dominant, and that everything else came from one of those. Simple and it works for much of the basic stuff we would want to do.

By the way, I asked Joe one time what his advice was for playing chord melody solos (that is what guitarists call “cocktail style” as used for the piano styling). He simply said “learn melodies”.

Tony

Ah, I see, David. Thanks! I was looking everywhere except the seminar. I think I’ll have to listen to that through again – it’s been a few years now.

I think this scale discussion deserves its own thread – when I get a chance I’ll move some of this discussion.

One other observation I’ll make about learning scale paths: playing scales is tedious and boring for most of us. The connection to actually playing songs seems hazy at best and thus we don’t do it very thoroughly (myself included). However there’s a chicken and egg effect that comes into play once you start to do your own voicings because you’re looking for places related to (not necessarily “on”) the scale path (e.g. 3, b9, #11) to put your fingers so you can hear and make choices about voicings. You either already know these places well or you’re forced to learn them as part of the voicing process.

But it’s not about counting up a scale path (although you’ll do that for awhile), it’s about seeing chords as a shape that your hands get into. The scales just give you reference points.

So my recommendation is to voice lots of songs, try different voicings (which means you have to play chords before and after), and write down your fractions in pencil (you may change your mind).

You can’t “read” fractions in real time – that’s not the point of writing them down – but going through the effort will help ingrain scales and chord shapes. The chord shapes are NOT always contained within the root scale paths.

I don’t want to get too far down this particular rabbit hole – if you’re new to the Method it’s mainly important that you follow David’s directions even if you don’t understand why. But if David’s directions are not clear please ask. “Dumb” questions are crucial to your quest.

Interesting comments about the chord shapes, David. That is how most people learn the guitar in the beginning – memorize a bunch of shapes. Later, when we get into arranging for solo guitar, we start to expand from there.

My approach to the guitar has been simplified to:

1. Learn the location of all the notes on the fretboard so we can “see” them as easily as we can on the piano. I have a specific note finding exercise that only takes a few minutes a day that I learned from a Ted Greene book years ago, that really works well.
2. Learn how chords are “spelled”.

With these two pieces of knowledge, I can form any chord anywhere on the guitar fretboard – making it easy to harmonize any melody note. Then, it is my choice whether to play the entire chord at once, harmonize it, play only certain parts of it, etc. That is called “arranging”.

With the Sudnow scales, I just followed what he said on his tapes (the original 5 tape course). Back then, when I first got those tapes, I was going it alone, and didn’t have anybody to discuss it with. So I learned the scales with one finger and whole hand exactly as Sudnow said in the seminar. When I started voicing songs (at that time, you learned “Misty” and “As Time Goes By” as your only dot songs before voicing on your own) by counting up along the scales, again exactly as Sudnow described. Sudnow said that all the problems we would face in voicing tunes, had been addressed somewhere in those two tunes.

In later versions of the course (including the 12 tape course, which I got later on), he expanded on that, making more dot songs and many drills on voicing problems. Clearly, students had a lot of questions. 🙂

I have to admit, it was tedious and difficult to stick with. I did learn 3 or 4 tunes on my own that way before getting involved in the Sudnow group that you started. So I know that strict adherence does work.

However, there are probably better ways to do it and I think such discussion is warranted and certainly welcome.

Tony

Part of the challenge, from a pedagogical viewpoint, is that people have some variation in spatial perception. I don’t know, from a scientific perspective, if this variance is significant in the context of playing the piano but my amateur observations say it is. Things are further complicated by the fact that despite what David (and me, for that matter) have said about just following the Method, my own experience is that I stumbled upon plenty of my own insights simply out of curiosity and , more than once, boredom.

For me, it all boils down to three thoughts:

1. Give yourself time to just explore and play (in the most general sense) the piano.
2. Be patient with your progress and stubborn about your goals.
3. Perhaps most important: if it’s not fun, stop, take a break and find a way to make it fun again.