Motivation

[tbeltrans]

Every day we each make a decision as to whether to practice or not that day. When we miss a day, it becomes easier to miss the next day and easier again the next, until we realize we are not playing or practicing at all any more. This is one HUGE problem with self-teaching that seems to be less of a problem when we have to answer to a real live teacher and there is money on the table. When self-teaching, we have nobody to answer to except ourselves.

For me, as long as I remain aware that this is a decision I have to make every day, and a commitment that I have to renew every day, I seem to do better than I might otherwise.

Sudnow suggested having a group locally of students and that we play for each other. That provides motivation because we would not want to show up at the next meeting and have nothing to show for the time we were supposed to have spent practicing since the last meeting. We could do that here if a group of us were to agree to post at regular intervals, recordings of ourselves playing. It doesn’t have to be a complete polished performance, but only what we have accomplished since the last recording, even if only a few chords.

Another thing that Sudnow said is that we really have to want to do it. I don’t recall offhand if this is one of the parts that Sudnow cut out of later versions of the course or not…

He said of some of the students’ questions about playing the major scales with one finger in 2 1/2 minutes, and then with the whole hand (i.e. questions such as should I do them in order or skip around, should I learn them one at a time or several, etc.), that such questions were “an indication of the slippage in one’s caring”. He said that if he told one of the students that he would give that student $10,000 if he learned the scales as described in one week, that student would run out of the room so fast and be at home figuring out how to get those scales in his hands. The rest of us would follow and watch because it is the motivated student that teaches us how to learn, because the teacher has forgotten what it is like to not know how to do it and therefore have that burning desire to learn it.

Sudnow emphasized that we have to really want to learn this skill, and as he said, “it is a hardy skill, not something we pick up overnight”. He said it takes “days, weeks, and months of getting the opening chords to Misty into our hands”, and that we would go through a period of “hating” Sudnow, the method, and Misty, but that it gets better. He said that once we learned Misty, As Time Goes By would come a bit faster, and then with each successive fakebook tune we voiced, it would start to come easier until we find ourselves voicing on the fly and not having to think and repeat and write fractions so much.

He further said that we will stay motivated by reading about the piano (he mentioned he read a book about how to tune the piano, for example) and pianists’ biographies, and books about the music we are learning – popular song. He mentioned listening to piano music daily – really listening, and then described what that really means. He talked at length about choosing a “piano hero” whom we really want to play like, and then went into extensive history about the development of jazz piano and “song play” on the piano. I am certain all of that was cut out of later versions of the course, unfortunately. I still enjoy listening to that from time to time.

In other words, instead of boxing the piano into, say, a half hour or hour a day practice session, we make it a part of our daily lives in as many ways as we can. These are the ways Sudnow talked about staying motivated in early versions of the course. My role is to stay focused on these things and not let anyone dissuade me from that.

Oh, one thing about “playing by ear” that I should mention. Sudnow said that we are NOT to go home and try to figure out the chords to these tunes. He said that we learn to do that by playing lots of tunes from fakebooks. So, based on what he said in his earlier courses, playing by ear as a whole skill of (as Sudnow said…”being able to play anything we can hum”) is really building up several skills in aprallel – picking out melodies by ear every day, playing lots of fakebook tunes, and learning to voice tunes on the fly. This stuff just comes with time and practice, and at least for the first 15 or 20 tunes (possibly forever, if we want), we are working from fakebooks.

Tony

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