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Doesn’t look atypical to me. It’s not unusual for your fingers to fit rather snuggly between black keys (mine do too). If those fingers are more bent at the first knuckle and more perpendicular to the keys that will help. If your hands are angled a tad so those fingers aren’t straight on (which is a pretty natural position) your fingers are narrower top to bottom and thus not quite as tight.
I think you’ll grow used to dealing with this. You can have a fair amount of friction on adjacent black keys without actually causing hammers to strike strings. With an electronic keyboard the touch might be lighter and thus a bigger potential problem.
Stick with “Misty” for a while and see how things go. If you have a piano store nearby go try “Misty” on an acoustic piano and see if the difference in touch makes any difference. If you’re not actually causing the adjacent note to sound I’d wouldn’t worry about it.
Glad you’re having fun. Tell your friends. đ
And you’re correct, David was quite the motivator on stage. I’ve taken some liberties with how the material was edited and organized but obviously the words and voice are all Sudnow’s. I’m sorry he and I never had a chance to argue over those changes – I’m sure it would have been even better.You have to remember that when he first created all of these resources he had limited tools and technology at his disposal. And frankly he wasn’t too interested in mastering that technology, he just wanted to create a bunch of songsmiths. He talked about creating a new recording of the weekend seminar but just never got really committed to it. For me the tools were more robust and the learning curve more manageable.
His bias was that the underlying process was very simple and wandering off into more detailed aspects of music theory, while interesting, risked distracting beginners at the most critical time of their learning curve. That being said, you can tell from many of his recorded songs (see the “Advanced resources”) he enjoyed getting deeply involved in theory and especially harmonic ideas and improvisations.
Blah, blah, blah. At any rate, have fun. That’s the main point.
Hi Bob – I once had the opportunity to shake hands with McCoy Tyner. His hands were massive, his fingers like large carrots, and his grip velvety smooth. I don’t know exactly how he adapted his playing style to deal with his unusually large hands – I’ve never seen an overhead view of his playing – but obviously he figured out how to deal with those challenges. And many players have learned how to deal with unusually small hands.
Post a picture of where you seem to have problems and maybe someone will have some ideas for you.
Thanks for the feedback Gary. I used to put my cassette player (I actually still have my little Marantz with the ability to slow down the playback to help pick out melodies and runs) on my piano so I could listen and look at the keyboard at the same time. Technology improved and thus the rework you describe.
The original 12 tape course was very long. It went through a couple of edits that Suds made to shorten it and remove things he decided didn’t really have much to do with learning songs. The made it shorter but I think the weakness still was that it was difficult to see how topics were organized and find your way back to a topic when it became more pertinent to one’s progress with the Method.
What I did was take David’s last edit and pull it apart into smaller chunks, define and reorganize topics to separate the voicing info, which I felt wasn’t really necessary for getting started with “Misty”. And for most beginners the voicing info just muddied the waters and discouraged some people from even getting to “Misty”.
Your post has made me think that I should digitize and upload those original tapes just for historical purposes if nothing else. In my spare time…
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.I think this scale discussion deserves its own thread – when I get a chance Iâll move some of this discussion.
One other observation Iâll 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 donât do it very thoroughly (myself included). However thereâs a chicken and egg effect that comes into play once you start to do your own voicings because youâre looking for places related to (not necessarily âonâ) 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 youâre forced to learn them as part of the voicing process.
But itâs not about counting up a scale path (although youâll do that for awhile), itâs 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 canât âreadâ fractions in real time – thatâs 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 donât want to get too far down this particular rabbit hole – if youâre new to the Method itâs mainly important that you follow Davidâs directions even if you donât understand why. But if Davidâs directions are not clear please ask. âDumbâ questions are crucial to your quest.
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.
RE: Tony’s comments about Sudnow’s attitude about lessons, et al.
David Sudnow was a complicated and sometimes volatile personality – and I didn’t know him as well as many. Tony, I think you’re right about his attitude towards extending music lessons. He more than once quoted me Glenn Gould’s comments on teaching piano (reproduced on the home page of the web site).
What he said to me about the course is that he wished it would generate enough money for him to do the other thing he wanted to do more of: write. But I will say that he loved being in front of a crowd – especially of piano students.
Sadly we won’t get more of either.
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.
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.
Thatâs a great start Lee. Once you get through the rest of the seminar youâll begin to see more of the theory at work – and one reason why the scale practice is so important. Enjoy.
Thought Iâd add a note about Ted Gioia. All of his writing is worth spending some time with. You can find him on Twitter as well – catching up on things musical you wouldnât know youâd missed.
Hi Karl,
You might want to revisit the Weekend Seminar recordings.The âfifthâ and âseventhâ identify notes along a major scale path. The fifth note on that path and the seventh note – although by convention the term âseventhâ usually is understood to be the flat seventh (also called the dominant seventh). The seventh note of a major scale is spoken of as the âmajor seventhâ to distinguish it from the dominant seventh.
It can seem confusing when you try to write about it but I think the videos on the Weekend Seminar help clarify the convention.Hi Carole,
I know that you’ve commented before about the difficulty of finding discussions within the forum – with good reason.You can use the search function (within the forums) to find people or specific key words – that might help some.
You can also click the “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” box whenever you post.
Part of the challenge is that threads tend to wander off topic and what then should logically be a part of a different topic can get “lost”. It can be a lot of work to moderate forums and I’ve largely taken a hands-off approach, letting people organize (or disorganize )as they see fit.
You may, of course, ask me to try to track specific items or topics and I’ll help as best I can.
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