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That is true, but being able to have that on the guitar has its advantages. For arranging tunes on the guitar, you have to know basic diatonic theory which includes how to spell chords, and instantly know where all the notes are on the guitar. My paper details how to gain that ability painlessly. Once a person learns how to understand and work with the fretboard, arranging tunes is not any more difficult on the guitar than on the piano.
The problem with the guitar is how it is taught. I can tell by what things about the guitar bother people. If taught correctly, the layout of the fretboard is not an obstacle. Sudnow says much the same things about the piano. When people talk about “easy” and “hard” keys, that is a clear indication that the person was not taught correctly. With the Sudnow method, there are no easy or hard keys.
Tony
Yes. There seem to be a growing number of folks moving from guitar to piano as they move toward retirement age. I still play solo fingerstyle and chord melody guitar, as well as piano. I found another piano course that teaches through learning tunes. It is at artistworks.com and the instructor is Hugh Sung. I am currently working through that as well.
Tony
Having played guitar as my primary instrument, professionally full time for a few years (Holiday Inn circuit and supper clubs and resorts) and then in several jazz groups after that, I have had my share of practice too. The problem for guitarists is that they are told to practice all manner of stuff that is really unnecessary. I see modes in that light too. I wrote a paper back in 1995, detailing what a guitarist really does need to know, and eliminating everything else. It builds very logically and is available free. Here is one place you can view it, where another guy kindly reformatted it from its original ASCII:
http://www.lickbyneck.com/Lesson-CHORDMELODYGUITAR-AnOrganizedApproach-FormattedByColinSobers.htm
The Sudnow method does a similar thing – eliminates the unnecessary stuff that many teachers pad their methods with to continually generate revenue.
Tony
One final comment I want to make about the Sudnow method so I am not cluttering up this forum with my comments any further (except by responding to other posts) is this…
A big advantage with the Sudnow method is that you always know exactly what you are to be doing each day as you sit at the piano. If you have any doubts, just go back through the seminar and really listen to what Sudnow is saying. It really isn’t complicated at all. If you go to youtube (as I am sure many of us have by now), it is an absolute mess, with everybody posting a piece of this and that, with little or no continuity. There are several youtube channels devoted to teaching piano such as Creative Piano Academy, Marigold Project, and others, but none seem to present as well lit a path as Sudnow does. They all seem to teach a bit of something in each video, with no continuity or logical progression. The same is true for many of the various piano courses available online at various teaching sites. Sudnow put a lot of thought into his method and tested on many folks before putting together his method, according to the story he tells on those early tapes.
If you watch the piano world forum, you will find that folks are going from one method to another, rather than sticking with one method all the way through. That just seems to be a difficulty experienced when self-teaching. If we can overcome those long periods of being alone and plunking away at the keyboard long enough to really see the results of our efforts, then I see no reason that many of these courses would “work” (as is so often asked). At least with the Sudnow method, we have a clear, unwavering path – get a few “dot” songs into our hands, then voice and learn in the same manner 15 or 20 tunes of our own choosing from fakebooks, and then we can begin to explore whatever interests us. By then, we shouldn’t need that strict level of guidance because we will have developed our fundamental skills by then. We are learning far more than we realize at the time while “plonking” away at those dot songs and then voicing our own to plonk away at, though that may seem to difficult to keep in mind while in the midst of doing that.
Consider this…
Occam’s razor is the problem-solving principle that the simplest solution tends to be the right one. Being a software engineer by career, I have certainly seen the value of this concept in practice. If you look at the various piano methods one could take, Sudnow’s method seems the most simple and direct.
Tony
Fortunately, there are enough versions of Sudnow’s course available now (including this site), to please everybody. I personally found Sudnow to be a very interesting person. Whether I agree with a person’s view or not, I always respect those who think through their take on things and then present it well. Sudnow observed well and processed deeply, and was always the academic, and probably a difficult person to be around for any length of time. 🙂
I have digitized the 12 tapes as MP3s, and that is what I listen to these days. However, I honestly question whether much of that material would be of use to anybody, since very few would be interested in Sudnow’s lectures. 🙂
Tony
One thing that Sudnow stressed was that we should adhere strictly to the basic method when voicing our own tunes, for the first 15 or 20 tunes. These would then sound rather mechanical since we were not to add any flourishes or otherwise “jazz up” the tunes. The idea was to focus strictly on grabbing those clusters until that became almost second nature for us.
This would then also mean that we would not be working on Song of the Month, Pianoside Chats, etc., until after those 15 or 20 tunes. Referring back to the 12 tape course, he spent time on what it means to “know” a tune and being able to play it well. Our hands needed to know where to go without hesitation and fumbling, and that wouldn’t happen until we had that many tunes well in hand.
One problem Sudnow described that stems from not being able to readily grab those clusters, is that of choosing appropriate voicing when voicing our own tunes. The problem is that, until we can easily move from one chord to another, how can we hear in context, how our voicing choices will sound?
Another is that until our hands can easily move around the keyboard on their own, how can we begin to tackle (with any success) the rhythmic variations such as stride if we are still fumbling around to find our way around the keyboard?
If we take on too much too fast, we would become overwhelmed and frustrated in our efforts and give up to soon, before we started to see the results from our practice. He stressed over and over, careful attention to playing on time, perfectly, and that we can only play what we know (i.e. the current chord and the next chord to learn), rather than fumbling and skimming carelessly through a song to get to the end. He said that his approach is counter to what our culture celebrates – the easy fix and immediate gratification.
Now, whether or not we individually choose to follow that advice is, of course, up to each of us. But one thing that Sudnow cautioned was that if we didn’t follow his advice, we would become bored with the method because we would not be achieving the results he had described.
We have seen that many of us have strayed from the course, come back, strayed again, etc. For me, it has been because the process becomes one of drudgery after a while of constantly “plonking” (a term coined by one of the folks who used to attend David Haynes’ Sudnow study group) through the tunes, chord by chord. It can be difficult to maintain long term interest going it alone for long stretches. I think this is where a forum or, even better, a local group (as Sudnow described in his tapes) meeting regularly can help each participant to maintain that focus and commitment. It is just how us humans seem to work. That is how AA keeps folks sober, churches keep people focused on their commitment, and all manner of hobby groups keep members growing in the hobby. It is why I chose to attend night classes to finish my college education, rather than do it long distance via a web site.
Tony
When I got my first version of the Sudnow method, it was 5 cassette tapes and a 3 ring binder with text and diagrams accompanying the method. The diagrams are probably still the same in later versions of the course, and the text is greatly expanded. I used to listen to those tapes every work day, driving to and from work. The drive time was approximately the length of one side of the tape. I must have gotten a pretty good understanding of the seminar, because when I later talked to Sudnow, he didn’t seem to have to correct me very much when discussing the method.
I was the one who mentioned the 12 tape course. There were apparently several different incarnations of the course. As far as I know, the largest was the 12 tape course. The first incarnation that I had, 5 tape course, contained only the recorded seminar. The 12 tape course had the 5 tape seminar, but the first half of the first tape was largely an additional introduction, and the second half of the 6th tape was an explanation of what to do with the remaining 6 tapes, so that took up the first 6 tapes.
The remaining tapes had, according to Sudnow, what he felt he needed to add to address the questions students were asking at his seminars, especially those students who were currently working through the method. He had added several new “dot” songs (the 5 tape course only had “Misty” and “As Time Goes By”, after which we were expected to voice our own from there on). He always seemed to be wrestling with his desire to get students voicing right away and off of the dot songs, and students’ feeling unprepared to do that. So one of the extra tapes was him playing and discussing learning each of the dot songs. There were a couple of tapes dedicated to voicing drills, where he would call out a melody note and tell you what chord to voice under it, and then he would give his solution. There was a tape devoted to adding rhythmic variation, including details on learning to play stride piano. There was a tape that introduced his first additional tape series, that had one side devoted to blues, and the other devoted to how to select a suitable piano to buy.
At the time, that course cost $150, and you could also buy an additional book of voicing practice that had several “dot” songs that you had to fill in the blanks on the keyboard and fractions. He would give part of each solution and you filled in the rest.
In later incarnations of the course, he cut back dramatically because he was concerned that the 12 tape course was too expensive for many students to afford. It seemed to me that he was always trying to find the “sweet spot” for his course in terms of who his market was and how best to position his course. I was on the outside looking in, so that is only my impression from a distance.
Thanks to David Haynes, I was able to meet and discuss the course directly with Sudnow. I asked him how I could get from his course to other styles of music that interested me at the time. He gave me an answer in the form of a somewhat short lecture (he was an academic after all, and being college educated, I was used to taking notes from a professor 🙂 ). I wrote out my notes on the inside front and back pages of the book that came with the 12 tape course, and did type them into a post here some years ago.
The basic idea of that little lecture was an analogy – you have 12 bowling balls and, each with a different configuration for your fingers to go into, and your job is to learn to grab any of those configurations quickly. Once your hands can do that, you can pretty much learn to grab any configuration (i.e. different piano styles).
Not everybody appreciated/enjoyed Sudnow’s long lectures. I actually enjoyed that aspect of college, doing the research and writing papers, and attending lectures when done by professors who clearly had passion for their subject material. The original seminar had plenty of that. He delved into the politics of why piano is formally taught as it is, the economics of having to teach and make courses long enough to support the teacher, the cultural biases that we as students have to contend with regarding talent and other “myths” as he put it, his studies of how adults learn and the physical aspects of learning to play, among other subjects. To me, it was fascinating and I enjoyed all of it. I still go back and listen to it.
Also, he spent a lot of time on the history of the style of piano we were to learn, all the great jazz players, and the history of that style from its beginnings through today (current at the time of the course), as well as how to select proper fakebooks to work with and even the history of those. I got an appreciation of the style and players that I didn’t have before that. He also talked a lot about the singers we should listen to, since many of us didn’t really have decent exposure to the standards (i.e. the Great American Songbook). I really benefited from that, and went out and bought a lot of what he recommended.
So, for me, the 12 tape course was what I always go back to. Based on discussions that went on in the meetings of the Sudnow study group that David Haynes formed and ran for a time, I was pretty much alone in my appreciation of Sudnow’s lecturing. So I really don’t think that anyone is missing out on not having that version of the course. David Haynes has done a really good job of presenting the important (to learning to play piano via the Sudnow method) parts of the earlier versions course on this web site. The site has all you need, and then some, to get into the method successfully. I especially appreciate David having put up the Song of the Month series and the Pianoside Chat series, since I never signed up for those.
I hope that helps clarify things…
Tony
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
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
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
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
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. 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
Thanks David. I always had the sense that Sudnow was a bit “anti-establishment” and had a sense that the economics of trying to live off the students by extending lessons needlessly was immoral, in a humanitarian, rather than religious, sense. He seemed, at least on the 12 tape course that I have, to be almost “giving away the store” in an effort to make the course as complete as possible for the student, while not pricing it out of reach of the intended audience. He seemed to go almost overboard in trying to provide guidance for those who really wanted to learn.
In a way, it reminds me of the lab instructor when I went through electronics school. He was an older guy, probably in his late 60s or early 70s at the time. I was involved in collecting and restoring old radios from the 1920s, the ones with the big tubes and horn speakers. He would stick around after school and show me how to rewind those old horn speaker voice coils, wind the spider-web coils, and other stuff that only someone of his age would know how to do. He never charged extra for it because he loved the fact that there was anybody interested in learning the stuff he cared about.
You probably knew Sudnow better than any of us, so I realize I am on the outside looking in, and I may be way off base. That is just the idealized impression I had of Sudnow, that his passion was playing piano and showing adults that they could do it too.
It seems to me that the way to make a living online is with a lot of hype and a little bit of product (i.e. big margins). The Sudnow method just doesn’t seem to fit that model. 🙂
Tony
Wow! I had no idea there wee that many. I thought that what you had was pretty much what there was, since I knew that he had not followed up much on those series. That is a lot of material.
If you want to “divide and conquer”, I could digitize those recordings as MP3s and return them and the tapes to you so you can get the material on the site. It is time consuming, I know since I have done much of that sort of thing on other material. Ripping CDs or DVDs is relatively quick, but digitizing tapes involves having to play through the entire tape to record it as an MP3 or wav file.
Tony
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