In the PianoWorld Adult Beginner forum, somebody posted looking to find a practice partner to help keep that person motivated. The posts in this blog have dealt with my personal journey through wanting to teach myself via various methods to learn to play piano. I finally returned to the Sudnow method. It is not a reflection on the quality or effectiveness of that method that I ultimately did not stick with it. Instead, I began to realize through a series of interactions with certain people in my life, that I really needed to dig into myself to find out what it is I REALLY want to do. When I find that, I will be motivated and focused to do it. It really is that simple. I did find that, and it is a combination of guitar and keyboards, rather than a focus on purely playing piano. Since discovering that and making that shift in my approach to music, I have really been enjoying my time with music. There will be a blog post here on that in the near future, but in the mean time, I am putting my response to that question in the forums, in the sincere hope that it challenges some (if not all) readers to look within themselves for their true interests - because that is where their motivation to succeed will be. Here is that post:
On the surface, this seems like a good idea - and it MAY work for some people. But in my experience of getting involved in the "jogging partner" thing, it ends up detracting from one's own musical direction.
If you really, really want to learn to play piano, then you will find the motivation to do it. If you can't bring yourself to practice, then I would really question how badly I wanted to learn whatever it was that I was practicing. Maybe what you are learning/practicing and what you want to play are not the same thing. It is very unfortunate that, when a person decides s/he wants to learn to play piano because of something that person loves to listen to - the person is usually directed to doing something entirely different in the name of learning to play the instrument (i.e. do these exercises for a few years and then we will consider your needs and interests, or if you learn to play classical piano first, you can then play anything, etc, etc...). It is that disconnect that seems to kill motivation.
We tend to think of going directly for what we want to somehow be "cheating the system" - we HAVE to do it a certain way or it somehow "doesn't count". So, we wade through the Thompson books or Alfred books or whatever, when what we really want to learn is to play some of the tunes we hear on the radio.
I realize this is often a very unpopular view. When Sudnow came out with his method, there were all manner of knowledgeable teachers lining up to "debunk" his claims that he could teach people to play songs at the piano without the years of exercises (the same time and amount of effort is spent learning, but the activities in the process are quite different). I am not selling the Sudnow method here, but am only using it as an example of a real effort by a real person to offer an alternative to the "common wisdom" about learning to play piano. His is not the only way to do it, but it is a way to a certain type of song play - for those who want to play that way. If that isn't what you REALLY wanted to do after all, then you will end up suffering through that method as you would any other that isn't going where you wanted to go in the first place.
You can certainly apply his general method to other types of music. For example, Hal Leonard has a series of books that show how many of the songs we who grew up with the music of the 60s and 70s on the radio, are actually played. You can find relatively simple books that show you how to read music (i.e. when you see this dot, you play this key on the piano). Then you can slowly piece together some song that you have a burning desire to learn. You know how the song is supposed to sound because every time you heard it on the radio, you listened because you liked that song - you can clearly hear it in your head. You will stick with it because you really, really want to play THAT SONG. In the process of learning that song, you are learning the keyboarding skills you need to learn the next song and the next and the next. Sudnow's fundamental idea was that the way adults stay motivated is not by breaking everything down into little exercises, but by diving into the deep end and playing the songs that excite them. It is an arduous thing to do, and will take months of struggling to get it to sound the way you want to hear it (especially in the beginning first year or two), but during all that time, you are focused on playing what it is you wanted to play in the first place. That is motivating, and it can be done. Sudnow said that it all comes down to how badly you want it.
Whenever I spent time and effort finding and then maintaining a "jogging partner" relationship, it seemed to detract from my original vision of what I wanted to accomplish. I was looking for motivation, not from within where it belongs, but from some external source. I exercise every day. I don't need a joggging partner and I don't spend money on a health club or exercise equipment. My motivation is that as a man, I don't look like I am expecting a baby. From time to time, I get a milestone, such as when I bought new pants because my waist size dropped several inches after 6 months of right eating and daily exercise. I wanted to do it, and the results I got along the way have kept me at it. If you are not motivated to do what you say you wish to do, then it is time to re-examine whether you are doing what you wanted to do in the first place, or whether you really wanted to do it after having actually tried it. Self-discovery is really a series of experiments to find what it is we really are about.
During periods in my life when I have taught guitar, I have found a percentage of students who have realized that the guitar was not the priority in their lives they thought it might be. To me, that is a very reasonable outcome. In that case, do something else that you do want to do. How do you find it? Try something else. When you find what motivates you, you will do it. That is human nature. If playing the piano is an arduous task that you do not REALLY want to do, then maybe it is time to question either your approach to learning or whether some other activity is where your leisure time is better spent.
Something to think about. These concepts can be argued until we are all "blue in the face", but that doesn't change anything. Those who want to badly enough will do it. Those who don't, won't. I have tried this and that method, but have been finding my own real interests in music. My interests involve fingerstyle and jazz guitar and keyboard, rather than purely piano. I have been developing keyboarding skills through the very act of making music on my Yamaha Motif XS8, and then adding my guitar to the mix and coming up with my own music. To some people that "doesn't count" as "real" music. But I can tell you that I don't need somebody telling me to practice. My goal is to enjoy making music, and that is exactly what I am doing - no long suffering over whether I am "doing it right" or whether I should learn this or that or how do I whip myself into moving forward.
It wasn't until I gave up on the idea of NEEDING a jogging partner that I began to look inside myself to find what I really wanted to accomplish. That is when I started to actually enjoy music making and looking forward to doing that every day.
Out of all these various methods, there seems to be a small percentage of people who really ARE successful with it and actually DO play piano or whatever it is that method teaches. Those are the people for whom it was the right thing at the right time. But their success does not necessarily imply that it is right for us too. We try this and that. If we are honest with ourselves about what we are wanting to accomplish and why, we will persist trying different things until we find our way.
Each of us has to find what "floats our boat" - and that is where we will find the REAL motivation to keep moving forward. We each have our own musical voice, and that is what we need to find.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Monday, September 1, 2008
Back in the groove with Sudnow
We are just coming off of a nice, long weekend and I have some key things that I wanted to share with you who read my blog posts - in the context of learning to play piano.
The situation that spurred my interest in this was a recent discussion at Piano World about "talent". This subject ALWAYS comes up sooner or later. There seems to be a persistent cultural "myth" (Sudnow's term that I find to be accurate) that a person has to have "talent" in order to be able to play piano successfully. What is talent and what happens to those of us who don't have it?
My understanding, based on the discussions I have read, heard, and participated in regarding talent, is that it is "natural ability". I can assure you that, once you run into one of those rare individuals blessed with "natural ability" for creating music, you will not forget it. Such people DO exist, but there are not a lot of them relative to the population as a whole, and that is why they are the "stuff of legends" (rather than being considered commonplace). Does that mean that the rest of us are doomed to never developing the ability to play?
Again, from what I have read, heard, and observed, this idea of "talent" can be measured on a bell curve, much as grading was often done in school. There are a few people on the "no talent" end (probably one in several million at most) and there are a few on the "talent" end (again, probably one in several million at most).
So, what about the rest of us (the VAST majority of people)?
The good news is that there IS hope for the rest of us, though it will take a strong desire, focus, and persistence to develop our musical abilities. Personally, I believe that worrying about talent and all the reasons why we can't succeed is an absolute waste of time that will destroy any hope of us ever achieving our musical goals. My advice is to simply not focus on that, and instead focus on what you CAN do to achieve your goals, and that is what the rest of this post is about.
Once we have made a decision regarding HOW we want to develop our musical abilities, how do we develop the motivation to start and then continue, for the "long haul" down the path toward our desired musical goals? Whenever any discussion occurs about these types of questions, the word "motivation" always comes to the center and becomes core of the discussion. There is a HUGE online industry whose focus is selling motivational products and services. The underlying assumption is that motivation comes from within - that we can "think" our way to being motivated. However, the REAL solution is absolutely free:
Motivation does not come from within, but instead comes from doing the right things. We don't "think" our way to motivation, but instead we "act" our way to motivation.
Think about the impact of this. Instead of spending lots of money on various motivational products and tools, all we have to do is have a plan and execute it! How simple is that?!?!?
Another popular way of saying this is "act as if". Act as if you already have whatever it is you want, and the emotion will surely follow. So, if you want the motivation to sit down and play the piano every day, then sit down and play the piano. The hardest part is always initially sitting down to play the piano. Once you are there, it is easy to continue.
So, how do we get ourselves to do that? For each of us, this might be a bit different, but I find that for myself, several shorter periods of practice are far better than one long one, and doing it every day is far preferable to skipping days and then trying to make up for it in bigger chunks on fewer days.
For me, the key is twofold:
1. I need to know EXACTLY what I am going to do when I sit down at the piano. If I have choices, I tend to end up getting little or nothing done. For me, having a structured approach works best. The Sudnow method provides this for me because Sudnow describes EXACTLY how he wants us to go about the process of practicing and learning a song at a time.
2. I need to sit down at the piano first thing in my day, because once I do that, getting back to the piano at other times during the day seems to come much easier. It seems for me to be sort of like "breaking the ice". Once I have played the piano on a given day, I seem to find it easier to go back to it. That is also true for me about practicing every day. If I skip a day, then it is that much easier to skip a day the next day, and then the next becomes easier still to skip, and so on until months go by and I have not played.
The weird thing in reading over my blog posts is this:
If I REALLY want to play piano, why is it so difficult to get myself to stay with a plan to fruition and to attend to that plan regularly until I have reached my goals?
I don't honestly know the answer to that, but I do know that it seems to be a widely experienced situation. If that were not true, we would not have books such as "The War of Art" and "Mastery", among probably hundreds of others about instilling the self-discipline to follow through on our dreams. Being honest with ourselves about issues like I am talking about in these blog posts is not always a "pretty sight". More often than not, we would rather not talk about this except in the third person so it doesn't hit home. It is always the other guy and not me who is not practicing regularly or making progress or whatever. But then, deep down inside, we are ALWAYS questioning our "lack of progress", comparing ourselves to those who post recordings in forums that provide for that, and finding other means for rationalizing why we can't really succeed. Heck, those people who play well MUST be "talented". If we were to admit that just MAYBE, they achieved their goals through sheer hard, consistent work, then we are forced to face our own lack of discipline.
All of this sounds a bit harsh, but truly, it is stuff that I have thought through and wrestled with for myself. I have had discussions with enough other people about this sort of thing to know better than thinking that I am the only one who grapples with it.
For the past month or so, I have been doing just fine, practicing every day without fail and making progress (though never as much as I would like). The reason I have been doing better is actually due to a number of factors:
1. I made a DECISION to stop screwing around on forums and such (except the occasional post AFTER I have done my piano practice).
2. I made a DECISION to stop screwing around with this method and that, since I already know which method is best suited to my personal learning style and temperament.
3. I made a DECISION that the first thing on my "todo list" every day is to spend at least a few minutes at the piano because I know that is enough to get me to practice several more times on the same day.
Notice that there is one thing common to all three items on my list: DECISION. I have already discussed what DECISION really means in a previous blog post.
I am not suggesting that everybody who reads this post should make the same decisions that I did, but I am suggesting that you make SOME decisions that are consistent with your own unique needs and means of learning, and then stick to them (which is what a real DECISION means anyway).
One thing I have discovered (or rediscovered) is that, once I have made these decisions and am following through, I come face to face with my own rate of progress. That can be discouraging, depending on how I look at it.
Here is an example:
The first year that I worked with the Sudnow method, the only "dot songs" he provided were "Misty" and "As Time Goes By". Later, he added "Danny Boy", and it is that later method that I am working with now. I decided to get the original two songs back into my hands and then master "Danny Boy" before moving on to voicing my own tunes. Within the first week, I had both original tunes well in hand, and had a start on "Danny Boy". But here it is, almost a month later, and I still have two pages of "Danny Boy" to get in my hands. I thought I would have been through "Danny Boy" by now and on to voicing my own tunes.
Using that example, I have a choice with regard to how I view this situation. I can view it negatively, as if there must be something wrong with me, because other people have worked with "Danny Boy" and gotten it well in hand, or I can stay focused on what Sudnow says we should focus on: we are learning a LOT of things that we don't come to appreciate until much later while learning any one song. To him, we should NEVER compare ourselves to others (because we will ALWAYS pick comparisons in which we come up short), and we should NEVER be concerned with how long it is taking us. Instead, we should ALWAYS focus on putting one foot in front of the other again and again, making progress at our own rate. As long as we don't stop playing, we WILL achieve our musical goals. The surest way to stop playing (and give up our musical goal and dreams) is to compare ourselves to others and concern ourselves with how long it is taking to get something done that we are working on. For everybody, different aspects of the learning process come easy, while still other aspects come with varying degrees of difficulty. Comparing one person to another is therefore, comparing apples to oranges, rather than apples to apples.
The fact of the matter is that I can play most of "Danny Boy" very nicely, and that is a lot more than I could do when I started. There is nothing to say that I won't finish the tune, and everything to say I will - as long as I don't talk myself out of completing it.
Tony
The situation that spurred my interest in this was a recent discussion at Piano World about "talent". This subject ALWAYS comes up sooner or later. There seems to be a persistent cultural "myth" (Sudnow's term that I find to be accurate) that a person has to have "talent" in order to be able to play piano successfully. What is talent and what happens to those of us who don't have it?
My understanding, based on the discussions I have read, heard, and participated in regarding talent, is that it is "natural ability". I can assure you that, once you run into one of those rare individuals blessed with "natural ability" for creating music, you will not forget it. Such people DO exist, but there are not a lot of them relative to the population as a whole, and that is why they are the "stuff of legends" (rather than being considered commonplace). Does that mean that the rest of us are doomed to never developing the ability to play?
Again, from what I have read, heard, and observed, this idea of "talent" can be measured on a bell curve, much as grading was often done in school. There are a few people on the "no talent" end (probably one in several million at most) and there are a few on the "talent" end (again, probably one in several million at most).
So, what about the rest of us (the VAST majority of people)?
The good news is that there IS hope for the rest of us, though it will take a strong desire, focus, and persistence to develop our musical abilities. Personally, I believe that worrying about talent and all the reasons why we can't succeed is an absolute waste of time that will destroy any hope of us ever achieving our musical goals. My advice is to simply not focus on that, and instead focus on what you CAN do to achieve your goals, and that is what the rest of this post is about.
Once we have made a decision regarding HOW we want to develop our musical abilities, how do we develop the motivation to start and then continue, for the "long haul" down the path toward our desired musical goals? Whenever any discussion occurs about these types of questions, the word "motivation" always comes to the center and becomes core of the discussion. There is a HUGE online industry whose focus is selling motivational products and services. The underlying assumption is that motivation comes from within - that we can "think" our way to being motivated. However, the REAL solution is absolutely free:
Motivation does not come from within, but instead comes from doing the right things. We don't "think" our way to motivation, but instead we "act" our way to motivation.
Think about the impact of this. Instead of spending lots of money on various motivational products and tools, all we have to do is have a plan and execute it! How simple is that?!?!?
Another popular way of saying this is "act as if". Act as if you already have whatever it is you want, and the emotion will surely follow. So, if you want the motivation to sit down and play the piano every day, then sit down and play the piano. The hardest part is always initially sitting down to play the piano. Once you are there, it is easy to continue.
So, how do we get ourselves to do that? For each of us, this might be a bit different, but I find that for myself, several shorter periods of practice are far better than one long one, and doing it every day is far preferable to skipping days and then trying to make up for it in bigger chunks on fewer days.
For me, the key is twofold:
1. I need to know EXACTLY what I am going to do when I sit down at the piano. If I have choices, I tend to end up getting little or nothing done. For me, having a structured approach works best. The Sudnow method provides this for me because Sudnow describes EXACTLY how he wants us to go about the process of practicing and learning a song at a time.
2. I need to sit down at the piano first thing in my day, because once I do that, getting back to the piano at other times during the day seems to come much easier. It seems for me to be sort of like "breaking the ice". Once I have played the piano on a given day, I seem to find it easier to go back to it. That is also true for me about practicing every day. If I skip a day, then it is that much easier to skip a day the next day, and then the next becomes easier still to skip, and so on until months go by and I have not played.
The weird thing in reading over my blog posts is this:
If I REALLY want to play piano, why is it so difficult to get myself to stay with a plan to fruition and to attend to that plan regularly until I have reached my goals?
I don't honestly know the answer to that, but I do know that it seems to be a widely experienced situation. If that were not true, we would not have books such as "The War of Art" and "Mastery", among probably hundreds of others about instilling the self-discipline to follow through on our dreams. Being honest with ourselves about issues like I am talking about in these blog posts is not always a "pretty sight". More often than not, we would rather not talk about this except in the third person so it doesn't hit home. It is always the other guy and not me who is not practicing regularly or making progress or whatever. But then, deep down inside, we are ALWAYS questioning our "lack of progress", comparing ourselves to those who post recordings in forums that provide for that, and finding other means for rationalizing why we can't really succeed. Heck, those people who play well MUST be "talented". If we were to admit that just MAYBE, they achieved their goals through sheer hard, consistent work, then we are forced to face our own lack of discipline.
All of this sounds a bit harsh, but truly, it is stuff that I have thought through and wrestled with for myself. I have had discussions with enough other people about this sort of thing to know better than thinking that I am the only one who grapples with it.
For the past month or so, I have been doing just fine, practicing every day without fail and making progress (though never as much as I would like). The reason I have been doing better is actually due to a number of factors:
1. I made a DECISION to stop screwing around on forums and such (except the occasional post AFTER I have done my piano practice).
2. I made a DECISION to stop screwing around with this method and that, since I already know which method is best suited to my personal learning style and temperament.
3. I made a DECISION that the first thing on my "todo list" every day is to spend at least a few minutes at the piano because I know that is enough to get me to practice several more times on the same day.
Notice that there is one thing common to all three items on my list: DECISION. I have already discussed what DECISION really means in a previous blog post.
I am not suggesting that everybody who reads this post should make the same decisions that I did, but I am suggesting that you make SOME decisions that are consistent with your own unique needs and means of learning, and then stick to them (which is what a real DECISION means anyway).
One thing I have discovered (or rediscovered) is that, once I have made these decisions and am following through, I come face to face with my own rate of progress. That can be discouraging, depending on how I look at it.
Here is an example:
The first year that I worked with the Sudnow method, the only "dot songs" he provided were "Misty" and "As Time Goes By". Later, he added "Danny Boy", and it is that later method that I am working with now. I decided to get the original two songs back into my hands and then master "Danny Boy" before moving on to voicing my own tunes. Within the first week, I had both original tunes well in hand, and had a start on "Danny Boy". But here it is, almost a month later, and I still have two pages of "Danny Boy" to get in my hands. I thought I would have been through "Danny Boy" by now and on to voicing my own tunes.
Using that example, I have a choice with regard to how I view this situation. I can view it negatively, as if there must be something wrong with me, because other people have worked with "Danny Boy" and gotten it well in hand, or I can stay focused on what Sudnow says we should focus on: we are learning a LOT of things that we don't come to appreciate until much later while learning any one song. To him, we should NEVER compare ourselves to others (because we will ALWAYS pick comparisons in which we come up short), and we should NEVER be concerned with how long it is taking us. Instead, we should ALWAYS focus on putting one foot in front of the other again and again, making progress at our own rate. As long as we don't stop playing, we WILL achieve our musical goals. The surest way to stop playing (and give up our musical goal and dreams) is to compare ourselves to others and concern ourselves with how long it is taking to get something done that we are working on. For everybody, different aspects of the learning process come easy, while still other aspects come with varying degrees of difficulty. Comparing one person to another is therefore, comparing apples to oranges, rather than apples to apples.
The fact of the matter is that I can play most of "Danny Boy" very nicely, and that is a lot more than I could do when I started. There is nothing to say that I won't finish the tune, and everything to say I will - as long as I don't talk myself out of completing it.
Tony
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Back To Sudnow - lessons learned
When I started this blog, I had just started with Piano Magic. Piano Magic is a web site whose purpose is to teach us to play piano by ear. The format is to start with a series of lessons that get you to playing simple tunes with a specific chordal structure by ear, determining both the melody and the chords at the same time. After these lessons are completed, continued learning takes place through interaction with the instructor and other students in forums designated for this purpose. Along with this interaction, you will be expected to post recordings of your playing periodically so that the instructor can hear your progress and determine what you might want to focus on to improve. You will also get very supportive feedback from other students in the forums. Many people get a free account on box.net, put their MP3s there, and then post to the forum with a link to their recording.
As I have stated in previous blog entries here, there are different learning styles for different people. It takes experimentation and a certain amount of risk in terms of time and money spent to try different learning materials and determine what works best for you. At first, Piano Magic seemed promising for me, but after I had completed those structured lessons, the whole thing quickly became too ambiguous for me and my learning style. This is not a negative statement about Piano Magic. Instead, I see it as a mismatch between my learning style and that presented by Piano Magic. I could go into complaints about this and that, but in reality I have no "bone to pick" with the site or the instructor. Interaction with the instructor really requires that you ask questions in the forum and he responds, sometimes with a post alone, and sometimes with a video or an audio recording to illustrate a point.
The way I really work best is to be given a set of instructions and I go off by myself and work with it. If the instructions are clear to begin with, then there is little problem. If not, then I need to interact with the instructor on some specific aspect of what is not clear to me. Contrast this to what is done at Piano Magic. for me, because I don't have a clear set of instructions to work from, I can't formulate specific questions to ask of the instructor, so I don't post any questions at all. For me, it is a waste of time to just throw out some innocuous question just to get some sort of dialog started that I hope will enable me to keeping "talking" long enough to figure out what I really need to ask to get moving forward again. This is not the fault of Piano Magic. My learning style just isn't suited to what is done at that site. There are people at that site who have really benefited from what it has to offer, and that in itself supports my theory that everybody has their own unique manner of learning.
Over the last few weeks, I have been back into the Sudnow method. My original plan, the first time around with the Sudnow method, was to work with it through to completion, and then to go forward with the Shinn materials. The Sudnow method lays the foundation for the student to go anywhere they wish from there, and the logical choice for me is with the Shinn materials, since both Sudnow and Shinn suit my learning style. I am very comfortable with the Sudnow method. I feel sort of like the "prodigal son" who had to go out and taste the alternatives to discover the true worth of what I had available all along.
So, why was it necessary for me to leave the Sudnow method and fool around with other methods? What was lacking, what went wrong? If the Sudnow method is worthwhile now, why wasn't it then?
These are questions worth HONESTLY considering, and in so doing, we are uncovering the "elephant in the living room" that many people are aware of, but don't want to talk about. I believe, for good reason, that my story is not unique among non-traditional self-teaching aspiring piano players.
I found it quite interesting that, as I moved among the forums for various piano methods and places for piano students of all stripes to gather, I kept seeing the same names over and over again. I would see posts in, say, the Piano Magic forum of people who were pursuing that method, while at the same time, posts from these same names at Piano World asking about this or that method, expressing interest in making a change. When I posted at Piano Magic that I was going back to the Sudnow method, I got private emails asking for more information. At Piano World, I posted a contrary view to a review of the Sudnow method, and again attracted private emails of similar nature. Now, Piano World is an open set of forums where people with ANY interest in piano gather, so one would expect people there to be looking around for something new to catch their interest or motivate them.
Here is the problem I see in myself and potentially in some of these other people - the inability to make a definite DECISION to follow one path. We are always looking over shoulder wondering if we made the right choice, wondering if another path would get us "there" faster or if we might have more fun with another method, or if the style of music we are engaged in is what we REALLY want to do.
A real DECISION means that we have eliminated all other possibilities, and that THIS is what we are going to do. At that point, our focus becomes quite narrow, as we see only that decision. Have you ever bought a new car, and suddenly you begin to see how many of that same car are all around you? Prior to getting that car, all these same model were just more cars cluttering the path between where you are and where you want to go. There was quite a fad not too long ago, surrounding the movie "The Secret", in which the idea is that once you decide you want to acquire or achieve something, the "universe" (some call it God, some the "Divine", some "The Lord", etc,etc) puts people, situations, and things in your path to enable you to get whatever it is that you had decided on. While I agree that this phenomenon can be attributed in this manner, I think it is also just as likely that these people, situations, and things were always there, but we had no cause to pay any attention prior to our making a DECISION. This does not in any refute whatever people want to believe, since there are always multiple ways to view a situation, but it does lend credence to the power of REALLY deciding something and then moving forward.
Marriage is a good example of making a real decision. If the partners have really decided that they are to live according to the vows they made on their wedding day, then neither one of them will place themselves in a situation where somebody else seems more desirable (i.e. neither will be hanging out in bars or flirting with somebody that tweaks their interest), and both will be actively involved in supporting the other in their ventures, both in sickness and in health. It takes a DECISION on the part of both parties to get to where they will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary someday. This is just one important example of a decision. But today, we routinely see couples spending upwards of $10,000 on their wedding, and the a few years later, retracting everything that day stood for and the vows made. That has become the way of our culture, and we all get caught up in it until one day, we step back and see that we are getting nowhere.
It is a very common thing among the self-teaching piano crowd to see people who have been "learning to play" for several years, but still sound like beginners. We can go online and talk quite knowledgeably about multiple courses, but we can't REALLY play any of what these courses teach. We simply never made a DECISION that THIS is the course for us, and we are going to stick with it. We are fine through the honeymoon period where everything about the course is new and exciting and full of promise. But then (always that "but then"), we start to bog down in the day to day reality of actually sitting down at the piano and working through some aspect of the course and not seemingly making any progress. We begin to wonder if we are simply not understanding what we are to do...
We go online to either the forums for this course or other piano forums and begin talking about our problems. People listen and make suggestions. If we post to forums that are specific to our course, we get feedback from other people who have already worked through that problem. For a while, that seems to settle us down. But eventually, we begin to become dissatisfied overall and start looking for "greener pastures". If we go to more generic forums, we get feedback from people in other courses who are enthused (probably because they are still in their honeymoon period), and now that course seems really compelling to us, and off we go to that course's site and suddenly it is on its way to our house.
From what I have seen so far, there are usually only a handful of people for a given method who really seem to follow through and actually do the whole thing. They actually do learn to play well. This in itself proves that these methods CAN work for us, but we have to put in consistent effort for a LONG time. This seems to be a thread running through our society. In my area, there are countless ads on the radio and TV hawking all kinds of ways that people can finish college. Now, you don't even need to go four years to get a four year degree. You can go on Saturdays only for 15 months, or whatever. We are becoming non-traditional on many levels. There is nothing that says that "traditional" is better than these other avenues. I finished college later in life, but did the four years. But the danger is that there can be so much "corner cutting" that the real meat of the enterprise is lost. I don't think we really know at what that happens yet, and won't for many years.
But one thing we do know is that it takes a lot of consistent effort on the part of the learner to get his or her body to effectively make the necessary moves to play the piano well, and it doesn't matter which method we use, this remains true. The variable here is the method, and I have talked about the problem of matching method to learning needs for each individual.
I have gone through all of this wandering around piano courses. In the process, I have gained the experience of which I speak here, and have observed many others caught up in the same thing. As I began to "wake up" and see what I have been doing for what it really is, I realized that I had to make a DECISION. When we make a decision, we eliminate probably as much from our lives as we are getting. One thing I realized about myself is that I was using involvement in online forums as an AVOIDANCE of looking at myself, or even practicing piano as much as I would need to if I intend to make any real progress. I have bowed out of much of that involvement. My intention is to continue this blog because it requires only periodic attention when I really have something to say, but to spend little, if any, time in the piano forums. Instead, I have been consciously forming the daily habit of piano practice before going to work in the morning, and then again in the evening (when I might otherwise be online in the forums).
Also, I have listend through the Sudnow CDs again a few times, picked up "Misty" and "As Time Goes By", and "Danny Boy" again, and am working through the "voicing exercises" in preparation of voicing tunes from fakebooks again. Fortunately, because of the way Sudnow prescribes how we should practice, it all has come back fairly quickly.
I posed these questions earlier: So, why was it necessary for me to leave the Sudnow method and fool around with other methods? What was lacking, what went wrong? If the Sudnow method is worthwhile now, why wasn't it then?
...and then proceeded to NOT directly answer them. OK, here goes...
In the Sudnow method, we first learn the song "Misty". We do this by grabbing the first chord and releasing it. We do this over and over and over and over...until our hands can readily grab that chord. Then, we grab the next chord and do likewise. Then, we grab these two chords in succession until we can play them together smoothly. Then, we grab the third chord as we did the first, and then all three chords until we have them smooth. We proceed like this through each chord cluster until we play cluster after cluster smoothly, thereby playing the song "Misty" with nice, rich chords.
After we have finished learning "Misty" this way, we go on and do the same thing with "As Time Goes By". After we have learned "As Time Goes By" this way, we do the same thing with "Danny Boy". However, a curious thing stars happening by the time we are getting into "Danny Boy". We are finding that "Misty" starts "coming apart". It is sort of like juggling two balls, and every time we try to add the third ball, we drop another ball.
After a while, this gets really frustrating because completion of the Sudnow method (i.e. the point at which Sudnow says that we are ready to look for ways to start adding interest beyond playing chord cluster after chord cluster, which sounds clunky after a while), is when we have learned 15 or 20 tunes, just like "Misty", "As Time Goes By", and "Danny Boy". How can I get to the point where I can readily play 15 or 20 MORE tunes if I can't juggle the first three without dropping something every time I add something new?
This was very frustrating for me. At the time, there was a local Sudnow "support" group. In the early days of his method, Sudnow talked a lot about how Sudnow students were self-teaching, but that to retain motivation for the long haul, we should get together and play for each other and talk among ourselves about what we who listening to, how we were doing, etc. At this Sudnow group, there were several people who had years of prior piano lessons. They woud talk about how they did not agree with what Sudnow said about this or that. I was accomplished on guitar and knew music theory and that sort of thing, but had absolutely no prior piano experience, so that was new to me. I had been working with the Sudnow method for a year on my own before Sudnow came to town and gave his seminar. I did not attend the seminar itself, since I had already listened to the taped seminar a few hundred times (literally) already every day going to and from work. But I went to the piano store as the seminar was ending, and I played some tunes that I had learned from the method. I met people there, made connections, and when David Haynes started the group, I joined.
The funny thing was that I really enjoyed the group meetings, but got away from playing after a while. David Haynes, remained steadfast in his focus and playing. At first, I tried to always have a new song to play at the meeting, but after a while I got away from that. Most people in attendance did not play their songs for us, and many began to branch out to take lessons from local teachers and/or work with other methods. David Haynes IS one of the real success stories from the Sudnow method, but I tended to drift away after a while. I got back to playing guitar and played in church bands for a few years. But I have always wanted to play piano too.
Along the way, I discovered the online piano groups. By then everybody seemed to be hawking some sort of piano method, and everybody who wasn't hawking a method, was involved in one method or another and talking up its attributes.
With my decision to get back into the Sudnow method, I decided to do it exactly as I did during my first year alone with the method - which is in fact, the most productive time I have ever spent at the piano. For me, it is just something I need to do alone. For that reason, I have not become involved in the Sudnow online forums again. Those are really decent, supportive people oever there and for anyone wishing to pursue the Sudnow method - it is worthwhile to seek those people out. But for me, involvement in any such forum at this point is a sure-fire way to undo my decision to stick with it, as odd as that may sound - it is true.
Anyway... Over time, Sudnow began to grapple with the fact that far too many of his students were running into this problem of not being able to "juggle" more than a tune or two at a time. He started loosening up his take on this process. He began to say that instead of adhering strictly to learning ONE tune at a time, we really could be working on 4 or 5 at a time, learning a couple of measures from one, and going to another and learning a couple of measures of it, etc. He said that the important thing was getting these chordal clusters in hand, rather than memorizing tunes. Instead, the goal became to develop the ability to develop these chordal clusters in "real time" (my words) from a fakebook "lead sheet" presentation of a tune. This meant that we were developing a vocabulary of chordal clusters that we would readily apply to ANY tune we chose to play at any given moment.
To me it is admirable that Sudnow would change a part of his approach in response to real world observation of the application of his methodolgy. He did not retract or modify the foundation for his approach. He still felt to the end that practicing "on time, perfectly" was the shortest way to mastery, and that there were certain things we should be doing to develop our motivation. In fact, he accurately predicted EXACTLY what I went through, and I only saw it in hindsight.
I have learned enough about myself to know that, in order for me to actually get myself to sit down at the piano and play every day, I need to know ahead of time EXACTLY what I intend to do. If I have too many choices, I tend to flounder and not pick one thing over another. With the Sudnow method, he spends a lot of time talking about HOW to practice, what to do and how to do it, and how you know when it is time to move on to the next thing. That is how I work best alone.
There is a sort of double-edged sword going on with the advent of the internet and its easy access to anybody with a computer and a connection to the net. Products and customers are brought together as they have never been before. sure, there was the Sears catalog and that sort of thing years ago, and mail order has been a thriving enterprise for many generations. But the cost of entry was high enough to limit the number of products and services, and the time between when one ordered the product and it arrived certainly limited to some degree the number of impulse purchases.
But today, many of these piano courses are either completely online or are instantly downloaded with the flash of a credit card or PayPal account access. When I started the Sudnow method, very few people had access to the internet. I did because I worked at a company that was involved in computer communications. But for the most part, the internet was just starting to take hold and the BBS'es of the time starting to make way. Thre was a lot of interaction between people, but very little, if any, online commerce. Therefore, coming across the Sudnow method happened at a local store, and it was just a one-off sample they had laying around that nobody knew anything about, or even how it got there and where it came from. There really was no alternative, so that is what I worked with. The tapes that came with it were bad recordings because they would fade in and out and were generally difficult to hear. But I was determined because that was all there was.
With so many choices today, there is absolutely no incentive to stay with whatever we first ordered. As soon as we get bored (which happens in less and less time with each successive generation), we start looking around for something else - and we find not one thing, but lots of things from which to choose. Which one is best? Well, this guy in this group said this, and these guys in that group said that, so we will get this and see if we like it - we don't so we get the other one too. Neither of these products panned out for us (i.e. we got bored with them too), and these guys in this other forum are all excited about this one...and the cycle continues.
What I discovered with online communities is the same thing I discovered with being in the Sudnow group. I am sure that some people really do benefit from talking about their piano efforts all the time with other people. Personally, I have observed that talking about it all the time tends to dissipate my interest in it to the point that talking about it begins to replace doing anything about it. It isn't the group's fault. Instead, it is really just how I seem to function. Therefore, a part of my decision to stick with the Sudnow method is to bow out of involvement in the various online forums and focus instead on actually playing piano every day. Eventually, when I am playing well enough and have some real tunes well in hand, I will re-enter some of these groups and begin putting up recordings. But I need to form habits and lay groundwork first - one thing at a time.
The first year that I spent with the Sudnow method, I worked entirely alone because I simply did not know anybody else who had even heard of the method. Every day, I listened to those tapes in my car going to and from work, making sure I had it fixed in my head, EXACTLY what I was to do each day. Also, listening to Sudnow was incredibly motivating. When I got home, I worked and worked on grabbing those clusters, and gradually songs started to come out of my hands as Sudnow said they would. But it was a slow process, and I got impatient, and therefore was open to all sorts of temptation about other approaches that supposedly yielded quicker results. After dabbling with these other methods, I have discovered that, while they do have their merits, the Sudnow method is really best suited to my learning style.
The dabbling with other methods was certainly not wasted. When you are finished with the Sudnow method, it is time to decide what to do next. For me, the Duane Shinn method is a very nice followup to Sudnow. It, like the Sudnow method, requires NO interaction with anybody else to complete, and it fills in all the things that you don't get from the Sudnow method. Couple all that I have learned about HOW I learn best, and there is a solid formula for years of involvement with the piano in a very rewarding and satisfying manner. I work best from within a framework, rather than from a position where everything is a variable and I have to make an informed decision about things I don't yet know anything about. Arriving at this point of self-knowledge was worth all the diversion, and I certainly wish for a similar conclusion for all those who are still locked into that cycle of jumping from one method to another and/or spending all their piano time in various forums.
A word of advice to anybody who is grappling with the kinds of issues I have been presenting in these blog entries...
Realize first of all that, with the internet, what we say and do travels very quickly and can affect a lot of people. There are many piano methods available online now. While SOME of these might be outright scams (luckily, I have not encountered any course that fits this category), many (if not most) are created by very well-meaning and decent people who make all or part of their living from the sale of their courses. We can destroy these people's ability to continue providing their product through careless "reviews" of their materials. I have read "reviews" people have posted about courses that I have taken the time to get to understand, and it is clear from reading the "review" that the person really did not get below the surface with the method to understand where its value might be. Some posters have never even seen the course they are posting about, but instead are merely repeating what they heard or read elsewhere. This is just plain wrong. If the right person gets hold of the right course, a lot of good piano music can be made, and what is the right course for one person may be all wrong for another. I personally think that Mike at Piano Magic has a good thing going - for the right person. I can say that with certainty about the Sudnow method and Duane Shinn too. If I can post enough information about the course and the type of learning style that matches it, then maybe I can save one student some frustration while helping another really get into a positive learning experience.
With this blog, I am really taking a risk in front of the whole world (well, those who read these posts, anyway). I started out all excited about Piano Magic and have posted about a variety of subjects since then. Then, I essentially say "not really - I didn't REALLY mean it...", and suddenly I am back with the Sudnow method. It is at this juncture that I am either completely full of BULL or am honestly working through some embarassing truths. Time will tell. If, say, 6 months from now, I can post that I have been making progress with the Sudnow method, then you know I am "for real". If, instead, I have since posted "well, the Sudnow method was not REALLY what I wanted to do after all...", then you know that I am really wasting my time with the piano and this blog, as well as yours in reading this - other than as a sort of comic relief to a stressful day you might be having.
If there is value in these posts on my blog, it is the honesty that I present and the things that I bring to the fore for you to think about. People don't like to talk about the things I posted in this entry. I posted much of the gist of this in a forum, and people talked "around" it, rather than to it. It is certainly much safer to read it as a one-way conversation and then privately think through the issues and se if and where they might apply to your life. By virtue of the fact that we are all human, the chances that other humans can see something of themselves in what I have written is quite good. To find proof that I am not unique in all this, all you have to do is look through the archives in a couple of piano sites to begin to see the same pattern among some of the people who frequent them. Obviously, not everybody who frequents one or more of these sites is wandering aimlessly from course to course, but in time, you can recognize the pattern. The important thing is, now that you have read this, what impact does it have for you?
I am currently 55 years old, and am starting to realize that I may not have a lot of time left to realize my goal of playing decent cocktail style piano. I may live another 30 years, but during how much of that time will my fingers be supple enough to do what they need to create pleasant sounds? The chances for longevity of my fingers most likely depends, at least in part, on how long they have been doing what they need to, before starting to encounter problems with age. There are people well into their later years who play wonderfully, but these are people who have been doing it for quite a while already. 55 is not too late to have "been doing it quite a while" by the time I reach those "later years". In any case, the sooner I get going in the "right" direction, the longer I have to actually enjoy playing.
As I have stated in previous blog entries here, there are different learning styles for different people. It takes experimentation and a certain amount of risk in terms of time and money spent to try different learning materials and determine what works best for you. At first, Piano Magic seemed promising for me, but after I had completed those structured lessons, the whole thing quickly became too ambiguous for me and my learning style. This is not a negative statement about Piano Magic. Instead, I see it as a mismatch between my learning style and that presented by Piano Magic. I could go into complaints about this and that, but in reality I have no "bone to pick" with the site or the instructor. Interaction with the instructor really requires that you ask questions in the forum and he responds, sometimes with a post alone, and sometimes with a video or an audio recording to illustrate a point.
The way I really work best is to be given a set of instructions and I go off by myself and work with it. If the instructions are clear to begin with, then there is little problem. If not, then I need to interact with the instructor on some specific aspect of what is not clear to me. Contrast this to what is done at Piano Magic. for me, because I don't have a clear set of instructions to work from, I can't formulate specific questions to ask of the instructor, so I don't post any questions at all. For me, it is a waste of time to just throw out some innocuous question just to get some sort of dialog started that I hope will enable me to keeping "talking" long enough to figure out what I really need to ask to get moving forward again. This is not the fault of Piano Magic. My learning style just isn't suited to what is done at that site. There are people at that site who have really benefited from what it has to offer, and that in itself supports my theory that everybody has their own unique manner of learning.
Over the last few weeks, I have been back into the Sudnow method. My original plan, the first time around with the Sudnow method, was to work with it through to completion, and then to go forward with the Shinn materials. The Sudnow method lays the foundation for the student to go anywhere they wish from there, and the logical choice for me is with the Shinn materials, since both Sudnow and Shinn suit my learning style. I am very comfortable with the Sudnow method. I feel sort of like the "prodigal son" who had to go out and taste the alternatives to discover the true worth of what I had available all along.
So, why was it necessary for me to leave the Sudnow method and fool around with other methods? What was lacking, what went wrong? If the Sudnow method is worthwhile now, why wasn't it then?
These are questions worth HONESTLY considering, and in so doing, we are uncovering the "elephant in the living room" that many people are aware of, but don't want to talk about. I believe, for good reason, that my story is not unique among non-traditional self-teaching aspiring piano players.
I found it quite interesting that, as I moved among the forums for various piano methods and places for piano students of all stripes to gather, I kept seeing the same names over and over again. I would see posts in, say, the Piano Magic forum of people who were pursuing that method, while at the same time, posts from these same names at Piano World asking about this or that method, expressing interest in making a change. When I posted at Piano Magic that I was going back to the Sudnow method, I got private emails asking for more information. At Piano World, I posted a contrary view to a review of the Sudnow method, and again attracted private emails of similar nature. Now, Piano World is an open set of forums where people with ANY interest in piano gather, so one would expect people there to be looking around for something new to catch their interest or motivate them.
Here is the problem I see in myself and potentially in some of these other people - the inability to make a definite DECISION to follow one path. We are always looking over shoulder wondering if we made the right choice, wondering if another path would get us "there" faster or if we might have more fun with another method, or if the style of music we are engaged in is what we REALLY want to do.
A real DECISION means that we have eliminated all other possibilities, and that THIS is what we are going to do. At that point, our focus becomes quite narrow, as we see only that decision. Have you ever bought a new car, and suddenly you begin to see how many of that same car are all around you? Prior to getting that car, all these same model were just more cars cluttering the path between where you are and where you want to go. There was quite a fad not too long ago, surrounding the movie "The Secret", in which the idea is that once you decide you want to acquire or achieve something, the "universe" (some call it God, some the "Divine", some "The Lord", etc,etc) puts people, situations, and things in your path to enable you to get whatever it is that you had decided on. While I agree that this phenomenon can be attributed in this manner, I think it is also just as likely that these people, situations, and things were always there, but we had no cause to pay any attention prior to our making a DECISION. This does not in any refute whatever people want to believe, since there are always multiple ways to view a situation, but it does lend credence to the power of REALLY deciding something and then moving forward.
Marriage is a good example of making a real decision. If the partners have really decided that they are to live according to the vows they made on their wedding day, then neither one of them will place themselves in a situation where somebody else seems more desirable (i.e. neither will be hanging out in bars or flirting with somebody that tweaks their interest), and both will be actively involved in supporting the other in their ventures, both in sickness and in health. It takes a DECISION on the part of both parties to get to where they will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary someday. This is just one important example of a decision. But today, we routinely see couples spending upwards of $10,000 on their wedding, and the a few years later, retracting everything that day stood for and the vows made. That has become the way of our culture, and we all get caught up in it until one day, we step back and see that we are getting nowhere.
It is a very common thing among the self-teaching piano crowd to see people who have been "learning to play" for several years, but still sound like beginners. We can go online and talk quite knowledgeably about multiple courses, but we can't REALLY play any of what these courses teach. We simply never made a DECISION that THIS is the course for us, and we are going to stick with it. We are fine through the honeymoon period where everything about the course is new and exciting and full of promise. But then (always that "but then"), we start to bog down in the day to day reality of actually sitting down at the piano and working through some aspect of the course and not seemingly making any progress. We begin to wonder if we are simply not understanding what we are to do...
We go online to either the forums for this course or other piano forums and begin talking about our problems. People listen and make suggestions. If we post to forums that are specific to our course, we get feedback from other people who have already worked through that problem. For a while, that seems to settle us down. But eventually, we begin to become dissatisfied overall and start looking for "greener pastures". If we go to more generic forums, we get feedback from people in other courses who are enthused (probably because they are still in their honeymoon period), and now that course seems really compelling to us, and off we go to that course's site and suddenly it is on its way to our house.
From what I have seen so far, there are usually only a handful of people for a given method who really seem to follow through and actually do the whole thing. They actually do learn to play well. This in itself proves that these methods CAN work for us, but we have to put in consistent effort for a LONG time. This seems to be a thread running through our society. In my area, there are countless ads on the radio and TV hawking all kinds of ways that people can finish college. Now, you don't even need to go four years to get a four year degree. You can go on Saturdays only for 15 months, or whatever. We are becoming non-traditional on many levels. There is nothing that says that "traditional" is better than these other avenues. I finished college later in life, but did the four years. But the danger is that there can be so much "corner cutting" that the real meat of the enterprise is lost. I don't think we really know at what that happens yet, and won't for many years.
But one thing we do know is that it takes a lot of consistent effort on the part of the learner to get his or her body to effectively make the necessary moves to play the piano well, and it doesn't matter which method we use, this remains true. The variable here is the method, and I have talked about the problem of matching method to learning needs for each individual.
I have gone through all of this wandering around piano courses. In the process, I have gained the experience of which I speak here, and have observed many others caught up in the same thing. As I began to "wake up" and see what I have been doing for what it really is, I realized that I had to make a DECISION. When we make a decision, we eliminate probably as much from our lives as we are getting. One thing I realized about myself is that I was using involvement in online forums as an AVOIDANCE of looking at myself, or even practicing piano as much as I would need to if I intend to make any real progress. I have bowed out of much of that involvement. My intention is to continue this blog because it requires only periodic attention when I really have something to say, but to spend little, if any, time in the piano forums. Instead, I have been consciously forming the daily habit of piano practice before going to work in the morning, and then again in the evening (when I might otherwise be online in the forums).
Also, I have listend through the Sudnow CDs again a few times, picked up "Misty" and "As Time Goes By", and "Danny Boy" again, and am working through the "voicing exercises" in preparation of voicing tunes from fakebooks again. Fortunately, because of the way Sudnow prescribes how we should practice, it all has come back fairly quickly.
I posed these questions earlier: So, why was it necessary for me to leave the Sudnow method and fool around with other methods? What was lacking, what went wrong? If the Sudnow method is worthwhile now, why wasn't it then?
...and then proceeded to NOT directly answer them. OK, here goes...
In the Sudnow method, we first learn the song "Misty". We do this by grabbing the first chord and releasing it. We do this over and over and over and over...until our hands can readily grab that chord. Then, we grab the next chord and do likewise. Then, we grab these two chords in succession until we can play them together smoothly. Then, we grab the third chord as we did the first, and then all three chords until we have them smooth. We proceed like this through each chord cluster until we play cluster after cluster smoothly, thereby playing the song "Misty" with nice, rich chords.
After we have finished learning "Misty" this way, we go on and do the same thing with "As Time Goes By". After we have learned "As Time Goes By" this way, we do the same thing with "Danny Boy". However, a curious thing stars happening by the time we are getting into "Danny Boy". We are finding that "Misty" starts "coming apart". It is sort of like juggling two balls, and every time we try to add the third ball, we drop another ball.
After a while, this gets really frustrating because completion of the Sudnow method (i.e. the point at which Sudnow says that we are ready to look for ways to start adding interest beyond playing chord cluster after chord cluster, which sounds clunky after a while), is when we have learned 15 or 20 tunes, just like "Misty", "As Time Goes By", and "Danny Boy". How can I get to the point where I can readily play 15 or 20 MORE tunes if I can't juggle the first three without dropping something every time I add something new?
This was very frustrating for me. At the time, there was a local Sudnow "support" group. In the early days of his method, Sudnow talked a lot about how Sudnow students were self-teaching, but that to retain motivation for the long haul, we should get together and play for each other and talk among ourselves about what we who listening to, how we were doing, etc. At this Sudnow group, there were several people who had years of prior piano lessons. They woud talk about how they did not agree with what Sudnow said about this or that. I was accomplished on guitar and knew music theory and that sort of thing, but had absolutely no prior piano experience, so that was new to me. I had been working with the Sudnow method for a year on my own before Sudnow came to town and gave his seminar. I did not attend the seminar itself, since I had already listened to the taped seminar a few hundred times (literally) already every day going to and from work. But I went to the piano store as the seminar was ending, and I played some tunes that I had learned from the method. I met people there, made connections, and when David Haynes started the group, I joined.
The funny thing was that I really enjoyed the group meetings, but got away from playing after a while. David Haynes, remained steadfast in his focus and playing. At first, I tried to always have a new song to play at the meeting, but after a while I got away from that. Most people in attendance did not play their songs for us, and many began to branch out to take lessons from local teachers and/or work with other methods. David Haynes IS one of the real success stories from the Sudnow method, but I tended to drift away after a while. I got back to playing guitar and played in church bands for a few years. But I have always wanted to play piano too.
Along the way, I discovered the online piano groups. By then everybody seemed to be hawking some sort of piano method, and everybody who wasn't hawking a method, was involved in one method or another and talking up its attributes.
With my decision to get back into the Sudnow method, I decided to do it exactly as I did during my first year alone with the method - which is in fact, the most productive time I have ever spent at the piano. For me, it is just something I need to do alone. For that reason, I have not become involved in the Sudnow online forums again. Those are really decent, supportive people oever there and for anyone wishing to pursue the Sudnow method - it is worthwhile to seek those people out. But for me, involvement in any such forum at this point is a sure-fire way to undo my decision to stick with it, as odd as that may sound - it is true.
Anyway... Over time, Sudnow began to grapple with the fact that far too many of his students were running into this problem of not being able to "juggle" more than a tune or two at a time. He started loosening up his take on this process. He began to say that instead of adhering strictly to learning ONE tune at a time, we really could be working on 4 or 5 at a time, learning a couple of measures from one, and going to another and learning a couple of measures of it, etc. He said that the important thing was getting these chordal clusters in hand, rather than memorizing tunes. Instead, the goal became to develop the ability to develop these chordal clusters in "real time" (my words) from a fakebook "lead sheet" presentation of a tune. This meant that we were developing a vocabulary of chordal clusters that we would readily apply to ANY tune we chose to play at any given moment.
To me it is admirable that Sudnow would change a part of his approach in response to real world observation of the application of his methodolgy. He did not retract or modify the foundation for his approach. He still felt to the end that practicing "on time, perfectly" was the shortest way to mastery, and that there were certain things we should be doing to develop our motivation. In fact, he accurately predicted EXACTLY what I went through, and I only saw it in hindsight.
I have learned enough about myself to know that, in order for me to actually get myself to sit down at the piano and play every day, I need to know ahead of time EXACTLY what I intend to do. If I have too many choices, I tend to flounder and not pick one thing over another. With the Sudnow method, he spends a lot of time talking about HOW to practice, what to do and how to do it, and how you know when it is time to move on to the next thing. That is how I work best alone.
There is a sort of double-edged sword going on with the advent of the internet and its easy access to anybody with a computer and a connection to the net. Products and customers are brought together as they have never been before. sure, there was the Sears catalog and that sort of thing years ago, and mail order has been a thriving enterprise for many generations. But the cost of entry was high enough to limit the number of products and services, and the time between when one ordered the product and it arrived certainly limited to some degree the number of impulse purchases.
But today, many of these piano courses are either completely online or are instantly downloaded with the flash of a credit card or PayPal account access. When I started the Sudnow method, very few people had access to the internet. I did because I worked at a company that was involved in computer communications. But for the most part, the internet was just starting to take hold and the BBS'es of the time starting to make way. Thre was a lot of interaction between people, but very little, if any, online commerce. Therefore, coming across the Sudnow method happened at a local store, and it was just a one-off sample they had laying around that nobody knew anything about, or even how it got there and where it came from. There really was no alternative, so that is what I worked with. The tapes that came with it were bad recordings because they would fade in and out and were generally difficult to hear. But I was determined because that was all there was.
With so many choices today, there is absolutely no incentive to stay with whatever we first ordered. As soon as we get bored (which happens in less and less time with each successive generation), we start looking around for something else - and we find not one thing, but lots of things from which to choose. Which one is best? Well, this guy in this group said this, and these guys in that group said that, so we will get this and see if we like it - we don't so we get the other one too. Neither of these products panned out for us (i.e. we got bored with them too), and these guys in this other forum are all excited about this one...and the cycle continues.
What I discovered with online communities is the same thing I discovered with being in the Sudnow group. I am sure that some people really do benefit from talking about their piano efforts all the time with other people. Personally, I have observed that talking about it all the time tends to dissipate my interest in it to the point that talking about it begins to replace doing anything about it. It isn't the group's fault. Instead, it is really just how I seem to function. Therefore, a part of my decision to stick with the Sudnow method is to bow out of involvement in the various online forums and focus instead on actually playing piano every day. Eventually, when I am playing well enough and have some real tunes well in hand, I will re-enter some of these groups and begin putting up recordings. But I need to form habits and lay groundwork first - one thing at a time.
The first year that I spent with the Sudnow method, I worked entirely alone because I simply did not know anybody else who had even heard of the method. Every day, I listened to those tapes in my car going to and from work, making sure I had it fixed in my head, EXACTLY what I was to do each day. Also, listening to Sudnow was incredibly motivating. When I got home, I worked and worked on grabbing those clusters, and gradually songs started to come out of my hands as Sudnow said they would. But it was a slow process, and I got impatient, and therefore was open to all sorts of temptation about other approaches that supposedly yielded quicker results. After dabbling with these other methods, I have discovered that, while they do have their merits, the Sudnow method is really best suited to my learning style.
The dabbling with other methods was certainly not wasted. When you are finished with the Sudnow method, it is time to decide what to do next. For me, the Duane Shinn method is a very nice followup to Sudnow. It, like the Sudnow method, requires NO interaction with anybody else to complete, and it fills in all the things that you don't get from the Sudnow method. Couple all that I have learned about HOW I learn best, and there is a solid formula for years of involvement with the piano in a very rewarding and satisfying manner. I work best from within a framework, rather than from a position where everything is a variable and I have to make an informed decision about things I don't yet know anything about. Arriving at this point of self-knowledge was worth all the diversion, and I certainly wish for a similar conclusion for all those who are still locked into that cycle of jumping from one method to another and/or spending all their piano time in various forums.
A word of advice to anybody who is grappling with the kinds of issues I have been presenting in these blog entries...
Realize first of all that, with the internet, what we say and do travels very quickly and can affect a lot of people. There are many piano methods available online now. While SOME of these might be outright scams (luckily, I have not encountered any course that fits this category), many (if not most) are created by very well-meaning and decent people who make all or part of their living from the sale of their courses. We can destroy these people's ability to continue providing their product through careless "reviews" of their materials. I have read "reviews" people have posted about courses that I have taken the time to get to understand, and it is clear from reading the "review" that the person really did not get below the surface with the method to understand where its value might be. Some posters have never even seen the course they are posting about, but instead are merely repeating what they heard or read elsewhere. This is just plain wrong. If the right person gets hold of the right course, a lot of good piano music can be made, and what is the right course for one person may be all wrong for another. I personally think that Mike at Piano Magic has a good thing going - for the right person. I can say that with certainty about the Sudnow method and Duane Shinn too. If I can post enough information about the course and the type of learning style that matches it, then maybe I can save one student some frustration while helping another really get into a positive learning experience.
With this blog, I am really taking a risk in front of the whole world (well, those who read these posts, anyway). I started out all excited about Piano Magic and have posted about a variety of subjects since then. Then, I essentially say "not really - I didn't REALLY mean it...", and suddenly I am back with the Sudnow method. It is at this juncture that I am either completely full of BULL or am honestly working through some embarassing truths. Time will tell. If, say, 6 months from now, I can post that I have been making progress with the Sudnow method, then you know I am "for real". If, instead, I have since posted "well, the Sudnow method was not REALLY what I wanted to do after all...", then you know that I am really wasting my time with the piano and this blog, as well as yours in reading this - other than as a sort of comic relief to a stressful day you might be having.
If there is value in these posts on my blog, it is the honesty that I present and the things that I bring to the fore for you to think about. People don't like to talk about the things I posted in this entry. I posted much of the gist of this in a forum, and people talked "around" it, rather than to it. It is certainly much safer to read it as a one-way conversation and then privately think through the issues and se if and where they might apply to your life. By virtue of the fact that we are all human, the chances that other humans can see something of themselves in what I have written is quite good. To find proof that I am not unique in all this, all you have to do is look through the archives in a couple of piano sites to begin to see the same pattern among some of the people who frequent them. Obviously, not everybody who frequents one or more of these sites is wandering aimlessly from course to course, but in time, you can recognize the pattern. The important thing is, now that you have read this, what impact does it have for you?
I am currently 55 years old, and am starting to realize that I may not have a lot of time left to realize my goal of playing decent cocktail style piano. I may live another 30 years, but during how much of that time will my fingers be supple enough to do what they need to create pleasant sounds? The chances for longevity of my fingers most likely depends, at least in part, on how long they have been doing what they need to, before starting to encounter problems with age. There are people well into their later years who play wonderfully, but these are people who have been doing it for quite a while already. 55 is not too late to have "been doing it quite a while" by the time I reach those "later years". In any case, the sooner I get going in the "right" direction, the longer I have to actually enjoy playing.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
A small diversion
Since I have not posted in a while (life intrudes sometimes), I will post on two subjects today. I already posted on creativity in the learning process, and this post is really about that, but a bit of a diversion - recording yourself.
Many people will readily agree that recording yourself to critically assess your progress and determine what you need to focus on in terms of technique is a good thing. A small recorder such as the Zoom H2 or H4 or any of the other similar products now available are perfect for such an application.
But for those who are intent on creating music that involves several instruments, perhaps one or two "live" instruments and several sequenced instruments (i.e. a midi sound module playing sequenced tracks or a keyboard workstation or something along those lines), some form of multitrack recording is necessary. I want to make a few brief observations based on my own experience in this post.
I own a Yamaha Motif XS8 (the 88 key version of their workstation keyboard). As has been mentioned in previous posts, I have been teaching myself to play piano/keboard on and off for a few years, and I also have played guitar for many more years. In addition to being able to play songs in their entirety as solo piano pieces, I want to be able to create music that has multiple instruments involved, fusing together my keyboard and guitar interests.
Over the years, I have experimented with several different recording setups and have discovered a few things that may or may not be helpful to others considering a similar path. I do want to mention that I am finding that recording daily is a good thing. The idea is not so much to critically appraise my technique, but rather to capture various music ideas that I come up with on the spur of the moment and keep those that interest me for further development. This is a great way to work in the creative/exploratory aspect of making music.
What I have found to be generally true is that the simpler it is to operate the recording equipment, the more likely that I will use it. This is EXTREMELY important to understand because it will save you a LOT of money and enable you to creatively explore your music making without the complex intrusion of over building your home studio.
When you google around the internet to find advice about what to buy and how to hook it all up, invariably you will read again and again that you should start out simple, BUT THEN... you "grow" into a more complex setup as your ears become more discriminating and your skills in handling the equipment increase.
While I can't argue that your skills will increase with practice and that your ears will learn to hear more, I would argue that for many people, simple is still better on a day to day basis, especially if you are not intending to become a for hire project studio.
I have gone from simple to complex and back to simple again. I have gone from dedicated hardware to computer-based and back to dedicated hardware. While it would be difficult for me to argue for one approach over the other for anybody else, I can give you my experience and reasoning and you can be the final arbiter on what is best for you. The important thing is tl know what you really need and want, and what you would REALLY use when you are alone at home looking to simply make some music today. THAT IS THE SINGULAR FINAL DETERMINING FACTOR. No two people will have exactly the same setup. Some will go completely computer based, others will go completely dedicated hardware based, and others will combine the two in various ways.
For a time, I had a Roland VS-1880, which is a very good quality digital hard disk recording system - standalone hardware. the problem I had with it is that it was so complex that I had to constantly refer to the manual to get anything, no matter how simple it should have been, done. My work and life schedule does not readily lend itself to hours every day focused on recording and making music. If it did, I would have become very proficient at using this piece of equipment and many of the complex operations would have become automatic. For many people who have that luxury of time, I am sure that was the case. In the right hands, the Roland equipment can make professional quality recordings. But that quality and level of control over every little aspect of the recording has its price in user complexity. Yamaha and other companies have made similar equipment with similar issues, so I am not singling out Roland. If anything, Roland is at the top of the pile of these devices.
In the discussion about computers, there seems to be a lot of really odd ego involved. There always seem to be "religious wars" about which operating system environment is best, which application(s) is/or best, who knows more tham whom about computers, etc,etc. I find that sort of thing wasteful, and have never seen any good come out of such a stance. My discussion here is about Windows AND Linux (not Windows vs Linux), simply because I have no personal experience with the Mac. In general, the people I know who use Macs for their creative activities are very satisfied, so the prognosis for the Mac seems very, very good.
A few times in between dedicated hardware, I went to doing the recording on the computer. I have experience with both the Windows environment and Linux. Both can yield very good results at a very reasonable cost. With Windows, you pay for everything with money. In the Linux environment, it is more like buying a "fixer upper" house, where you pay less (even completely free, if you so choose), but it is up to you to make everything work together. For a while, there was a distribution called "Studio To Go" that cost only $80US and contained EVERYTHING you needed to just record and make music. Unfortunately, that distribution is no longer available.
I simply found that, for me, regardless of whether it was a Windows or Linux environment, the computer environment just does not appeal to my "creative" side. I work with computers all day, and when I get home, I want to do something different. Computers and music have never really been in the same universe in my own mind. But obviously MANY people think otherwise, and that is OK too.
The problem I have with the Windows environment is not with Windows, but with the licensing restrictions placed on users. There is no distinction between legal and illegal users of software. Therefore, everybody is treated equally. Personally, I do not like the idea of putting a Windows system on the internet. I really don't like the idea of having to run a virus scanner and all sorts of software that prevents people from hacking in and ruining an otherwise functional system. such software eats CPU cycles and the overhead from that is distruptive to a smooth recording experience. People who really know what they are doing (and can afford it) will often run two separate Windows systems. One is their internet access system and the other is strictly for their music work. The problem, though is that increasingly, software vendors are requiring that the computer be connected to the internet to register the software. But even for those vendors who don't require that, there are all kinds of "hoops to jump through" to register the software such as going to their site and providing the serial number of your hard disk or something weird like that to insure that the software is run on only ONE machine in accordance with the license.
But aside from these issues with Linux (time vs money spent) and Windows (licensing issues), there are issues common to both platforms by virtue of the fact that many people run applications from a variety of sources and require that these work together. Here is the scenerio:
You finally get your system up and running relatively smoothly. You have a recording package such as Cubase, Sonar, or ProTools and several other packages that exchange files or maybe even connect to these main packages in real time, such as VSTs for effects and sounds, maybe a dedicated sample playing package such as one of the big piano sample packages, a notation program, a program to master and burn to CD, etc. Each package is at a certain version and you know that version 1.1 of program X works fine with version 2.3 of program Y and so on. These packages are all quite complex because users demand features and vendors provide features to keep the customer happy and outdo the competition in seeking to fulfill the user's wildest fantasies of what a "fully equipped" application should be. It WILL take you a year or two or more to master each package well enough to get beyond the 80% of the features that each vendor had time to test before release. So, after a year or two (and a couple more releases of that software which you did not want to purchase because you don't want to break a perfectly fine running system), you start using some of the more esoteric features of a given package and you begin to run into problems because those features were not really well tested. You contact the vendor and they tell you that this was fixed two upgrades ago. The solution to the problem is that you need to upgrade that package.
So, you upgrade that package. There are two possible scenerios resulting from this:
1. You upgrade that package into your existing environment.
2. The upgrade won't run in your existing environment because there was a major operating system upgrade (Windows 98 to Windows XP, or Windows XP servide Pack upgrade, or Windows XP to Windows Vista).
Scenerio #1:
While it is possible that the upgrade will work just fine with your other packages, it is more likely that it won't either because the interface between it and the other packages has changed or because the format of the files the new package creates that are used by the other applications has changed. Now, you have a "domino effect" with having to upgrade the other packages, each presenting its own version of the two scenerios.
Scenerio #2:
You have to either skip the upgrade and live with what you have or upgrade your operating system. More often than not, upgrading your operating system will require upgrading your computer system due to increased system demands for processing power, memory requirements, etc. Also, the sound card and/or other hardware required to get the music into and out of your computer will not have driver support in the new operating system environment, necessitating changing all of that. So instead of the $39.95 for the upgrade, you are now buying a whole new system!
When you read all of the above, you should be able to see that NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH MAKING MUSIC!!!
What I mean is that now you are having to become your own System Administrator, spending your time keeping your system running rather than just sitting down with your instrument and making music.
With dedicated hardware, you learn it once and then you use it. The complexity of that hardware dictates the learning curve. The tradeoff is that the dedicated hardware does what it does and that is it. Dedicated hardware is not nearly as flexible as a computer in terms of what it can be made to do after the initial purchase. On the other hand, only you can decide what you really need/want to do. For many people, what dedicated hardware provides these days is more than enough functionality for their musical activities.
Remember that, with a computer, SOMEBODY must maintain the system, taking care of problems as they arise, keeping backups of the software and the data, and making decisions as to what to buy and when and when (or not) to upgrade any part of the system. That requires a different kind of knowledge than that reqjuired to play music. Do you REALLY want to do that?
I started with a Tascam PortaStudio back when cassette was "king" for the home studio. It was a defacto standard and was really simple to use and get decent results from - within its technical limitations of the cassette medium.
In between, I went through several iterations of dedicated hardware and computer recording setups.
Eventually, I came back to the simplest of dedicated hardware setups. Tascam has a very nice digital equivalent of the original Portastudio in the DP-02CF, which records to Compact Flash cards so there is virtually no noise from ANY moving parts. This recorder does not have a lot of menus, instead going back to the days when there was a knob for everything. The exception to this is selecting a song stored on the card and card management (i.e. formatting, erasing a song, etc) which are all very simple and intuitive operations that really don't require constant reference to the manual. This recorder does not have internal effects (which is a good thing since I have never really cared for the effects in most low- to midrange priced recording devices anyway). I put together a small external "rack" that consists of an Aphex 207 dual mic preamp, a Rane 31 band per channel graphic EQ, a Lexicon MPX-1 multi-effect, and a Furman power conditioner. These pieces provide very decent quality for a budget "studio", coupled with incredible ease of use. I bought the recorder new, but the other peices I purchased locally used for a mere fraction of what they would have cost new.
The proof of concept for my little studio is whether I use it on a regular basis. Well, I have been having a great time recording a variety of ideas. Hopefully, just like fishing, if I just toss the small ones back, eventually I will catch the big one - the idea that becomes a decent piece of music. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the process - which is really what it is all about for me.
Many people will readily agree that recording yourself to critically assess your progress and determine what you need to focus on in terms of technique is a good thing. A small recorder such as the Zoom H2 or H4 or any of the other similar products now available are perfect for such an application.
But for those who are intent on creating music that involves several instruments, perhaps one or two "live" instruments and several sequenced instruments (i.e. a midi sound module playing sequenced tracks or a keyboard workstation or something along those lines), some form of multitrack recording is necessary. I want to make a few brief observations based on my own experience in this post.
I own a Yamaha Motif XS8 (the 88 key version of their workstation keyboard). As has been mentioned in previous posts, I have been teaching myself to play piano/keboard on and off for a few years, and I also have played guitar for many more years. In addition to being able to play songs in their entirety as solo piano pieces, I want to be able to create music that has multiple instruments involved, fusing together my keyboard and guitar interests.
Over the years, I have experimented with several different recording setups and have discovered a few things that may or may not be helpful to others considering a similar path. I do want to mention that I am finding that recording daily is a good thing. The idea is not so much to critically appraise my technique, but rather to capture various music ideas that I come up with on the spur of the moment and keep those that interest me for further development. This is a great way to work in the creative/exploratory aspect of making music.
What I have found to be generally true is that the simpler it is to operate the recording equipment, the more likely that I will use it. This is EXTREMELY important to understand because it will save you a LOT of money and enable you to creatively explore your music making without the complex intrusion of over building your home studio.
When you google around the internet to find advice about what to buy and how to hook it all up, invariably you will read again and again that you should start out simple, BUT THEN... you "grow" into a more complex setup as your ears become more discriminating and your skills in handling the equipment increase.
While I can't argue that your skills will increase with practice and that your ears will learn to hear more, I would argue that for many people, simple is still better on a day to day basis, especially if you are not intending to become a for hire project studio.
I have gone from simple to complex and back to simple again. I have gone from dedicated hardware to computer-based and back to dedicated hardware. While it would be difficult for me to argue for one approach over the other for anybody else, I can give you my experience and reasoning and you can be the final arbiter on what is best for you. The important thing is tl know what you really need and want, and what you would REALLY use when you are alone at home looking to simply make some music today. THAT IS THE SINGULAR FINAL DETERMINING FACTOR. No two people will have exactly the same setup. Some will go completely computer based, others will go completely dedicated hardware based, and others will combine the two in various ways.
For a time, I had a Roland VS-1880, which is a very good quality digital hard disk recording system - standalone hardware. the problem I had with it is that it was so complex that I had to constantly refer to the manual to get anything, no matter how simple it should have been, done. My work and life schedule does not readily lend itself to hours every day focused on recording and making music. If it did, I would have become very proficient at using this piece of equipment and many of the complex operations would have become automatic. For many people who have that luxury of time, I am sure that was the case. In the right hands, the Roland equipment can make professional quality recordings. But that quality and level of control over every little aspect of the recording has its price in user complexity. Yamaha and other companies have made similar equipment with similar issues, so I am not singling out Roland. If anything, Roland is at the top of the pile of these devices.
In the discussion about computers, there seems to be a lot of really odd ego involved. There always seem to be "religious wars" about which operating system environment is best, which application(s) is/or best, who knows more tham whom about computers, etc,etc. I find that sort of thing wasteful, and have never seen any good come out of such a stance. My discussion here is about Windows AND Linux (not Windows vs Linux), simply because I have no personal experience with the Mac. In general, the people I know who use Macs for their creative activities are very satisfied, so the prognosis for the Mac seems very, very good.
A few times in between dedicated hardware, I went to doing the recording on the computer. I have experience with both the Windows environment and Linux. Both can yield very good results at a very reasonable cost. With Windows, you pay for everything with money. In the Linux environment, it is more like buying a "fixer upper" house, where you pay less (even completely free, if you so choose), but it is up to you to make everything work together. For a while, there was a distribution called "Studio To Go" that cost only $80US and contained EVERYTHING you needed to just record and make music. Unfortunately, that distribution is no longer available.
I simply found that, for me, regardless of whether it was a Windows or Linux environment, the computer environment just does not appeal to my "creative" side. I work with computers all day, and when I get home, I want to do something different. Computers and music have never really been in the same universe in my own mind. But obviously MANY people think otherwise, and that is OK too.
The problem I have with the Windows environment is not with Windows, but with the licensing restrictions placed on users. There is no distinction between legal and illegal users of software. Therefore, everybody is treated equally. Personally, I do not like the idea of putting a Windows system on the internet. I really don't like the idea of having to run a virus scanner and all sorts of software that prevents people from hacking in and ruining an otherwise functional system. such software eats CPU cycles and the overhead from that is distruptive to a smooth recording experience. People who really know what they are doing (and can afford it) will often run two separate Windows systems. One is their internet access system and the other is strictly for their music work. The problem, though is that increasingly, software vendors are requiring that the computer be connected to the internet to register the software. But even for those vendors who don't require that, there are all kinds of "hoops to jump through" to register the software such as going to their site and providing the serial number of your hard disk or something weird like that to insure that the software is run on only ONE machine in accordance with the license.
But aside from these issues with Linux (time vs money spent) and Windows (licensing issues), there are issues common to both platforms by virtue of the fact that many people run applications from a variety of sources and require that these work together. Here is the scenerio:
You finally get your system up and running relatively smoothly. You have a recording package such as Cubase, Sonar, or ProTools and several other packages that exchange files or maybe even connect to these main packages in real time, such as VSTs for effects and sounds, maybe a dedicated sample playing package such as one of the big piano sample packages, a notation program, a program to master and burn to CD, etc. Each package is at a certain version and you know that version 1.1 of program X works fine with version 2.3 of program Y and so on. These packages are all quite complex because users demand features and vendors provide features to keep the customer happy and outdo the competition in seeking to fulfill the user's wildest fantasies of what a "fully equipped" application should be. It WILL take you a year or two or more to master each package well enough to get beyond the 80% of the features that each vendor had time to test before release. So, after a year or two (and a couple more releases of that software which you did not want to purchase because you don't want to break a perfectly fine running system), you start using some of the more esoteric features of a given package and you begin to run into problems because those features were not really well tested. You contact the vendor and they tell you that this was fixed two upgrades ago. The solution to the problem is that you need to upgrade that package.
So, you upgrade that package. There are two possible scenerios resulting from this:
1. You upgrade that package into your existing environment.
2. The upgrade won't run in your existing environment because there was a major operating system upgrade (Windows 98 to Windows XP, or Windows XP servide Pack upgrade, or Windows XP to Windows Vista).
Scenerio #1:
While it is possible that the upgrade will work just fine with your other packages, it is more likely that it won't either because the interface between it and the other packages has changed or because the format of the files the new package creates that are used by the other applications has changed. Now, you have a "domino effect" with having to upgrade the other packages, each presenting its own version of the two scenerios.
Scenerio #2:
You have to either skip the upgrade and live with what you have or upgrade your operating system. More often than not, upgrading your operating system will require upgrading your computer system due to increased system demands for processing power, memory requirements, etc. Also, the sound card and/or other hardware required to get the music into and out of your computer will not have driver support in the new operating system environment, necessitating changing all of that. So instead of the $39.95 for the upgrade, you are now buying a whole new system!
When you read all of the above, you should be able to see that NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH MAKING MUSIC!!!
What I mean is that now you are having to become your own System Administrator, spending your time keeping your system running rather than just sitting down with your instrument and making music.
With dedicated hardware, you learn it once and then you use it. The complexity of that hardware dictates the learning curve. The tradeoff is that the dedicated hardware does what it does and that is it. Dedicated hardware is not nearly as flexible as a computer in terms of what it can be made to do after the initial purchase. On the other hand, only you can decide what you really need/want to do. For many people, what dedicated hardware provides these days is more than enough functionality for their musical activities.
Remember that, with a computer, SOMEBODY must maintain the system, taking care of problems as they arise, keeping backups of the software and the data, and making decisions as to what to buy and when and when (or not) to upgrade any part of the system. That requires a different kind of knowledge than that reqjuired to play music. Do you REALLY want to do that?
I started with a Tascam PortaStudio back when cassette was "king" for the home studio. It was a defacto standard and was really simple to use and get decent results from - within its technical limitations of the cassette medium.
In between, I went through several iterations of dedicated hardware and computer recording setups.
Eventually, I came back to the simplest of dedicated hardware setups. Tascam has a very nice digital equivalent of the original Portastudio in the DP-02CF, which records to Compact Flash cards so there is virtually no noise from ANY moving parts. This recorder does not have a lot of menus, instead going back to the days when there was a knob for everything. The exception to this is selecting a song stored on the card and card management (i.e. formatting, erasing a song, etc) which are all very simple and intuitive operations that really don't require constant reference to the manual. This recorder does not have internal effects (which is a good thing since I have never really cared for the effects in most low- to midrange priced recording devices anyway). I put together a small external "rack" that consists of an Aphex 207 dual mic preamp, a Rane 31 band per channel graphic EQ, a Lexicon MPX-1 multi-effect, and a Furman power conditioner. These pieces provide very decent quality for a budget "studio", coupled with incredible ease of use. I bought the recorder new, but the other peices I purchased locally used for a mere fraction of what they would have cost new.
The proof of concept for my little studio is whether I use it on a regular basis. Well, I have been having a great time recording a variety of ideas. Hopefully, just like fishing, if I just toss the small ones back, eventually I will catch the big one - the idea that becomes a decent piece of music. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the process - which is really what it is all about for me.
Today I want to talk about preserving creativity during the lifelong musical learning process. Please understand that my perspectives on this learning process probably do not reflect every (or even most) other people's perspective. Those who are taking a more traditional approach to musical learning are probably working closely with a teacher through formally structured lessons and/or are involved in attending one of the many fine music schools. My perspective is that of a person who is engaged in self-teaching either completely on their own or through one or more of the many self-study courses available in a variety of formats and possibly through online forums and teaching sites.
It can be difficult to maintain a focus on the goal of learning to play an instrument (in my case piano and guitar) with the technical demands and the associated tasks of striving to understand what we are doing in terms of the theoretical component, which at the same time maintaining a "playful" and creative approach to exploring music. The two focuses seem distinctly different, and in certain respects, they are for many people. I have met some people who seem to have a natural approach to music making that consists of a seamless joining of these two focuses into one, and the result is that some people just seem to have music "coming out of them" rather than that they have to first learn to play and then learn to have fun making music.
Having "ridden the pendulum" back and forth between the extremes of focusing intently on learning to play the instrument and the mechanics of music and just playing around with the instrument to see what I could come up with, I have lately been focusing on how to fuse the two pursuits into one daily activity. I have not really succeeded entirely, but I have come up with what I think is a reasonable compromise.
I have focused on spending a half hour each day focused on the mechanics of the instrument and making music, and then allowing myself to spend any remaining time just playing around (hopefully putting to good use what I spent that half hour on). It seems to me that one possible approach may be to let the "playing around" drive what I focus on for the mechanics. In other words, if I hear in my head something that I want to be able to play on my instrument, then that half hour might be spent on figuring out how to do that (i.e. the techniques required to make that happen such as a bit more left and right hand independence on the keyboard so I can play a bass line in the left hand while playing something with my right at the same time). Really, such an approach would fuse the two distinctly separate activities of learning and playing into one, where the learning is directly translated into what I want to play.
Is there really a point to learning something that I will not use (at least in the immediate future)? If I need to learn some specific thing later on, then I could learn it then. I have watched people who seem to naturally fuse the two activities of learning and playing together. Invariably, such people seem to be driven to recreate whatever music they hear in their head, and stop to learn how to do something that will enable that, whether it is learning how to "spell" some chord or scale they need at that moment or some technique that will enable them to play whatever it is they are trying to get out onto their instrument.
That, to me, is the ideal learning environment - the music comes first if one is to truly be creative. As it so often happens, we tend to get into the mechanics of playing the instrument and shutdown that creative, exploring side in favor of technique. While technique has its place, it is the creative, exploring side that is really what this is all about. Do we really want to forgo that so we can dutifully mimic what some other creative person has already done?
It can be difficult to maintain a focus on the goal of learning to play an instrument (in my case piano and guitar) with the technical demands and the associated tasks of striving to understand what we are doing in terms of the theoretical component, which at the same time maintaining a "playful" and creative approach to exploring music. The two focuses seem distinctly different, and in certain respects, they are for many people. I have met some people who seem to have a natural approach to music making that consists of a seamless joining of these two focuses into one, and the result is that some people just seem to have music "coming out of them" rather than that they have to first learn to play and then learn to have fun making music.
Having "ridden the pendulum" back and forth between the extremes of focusing intently on learning to play the instrument and the mechanics of music and just playing around with the instrument to see what I could come up with, I have lately been focusing on how to fuse the two pursuits into one daily activity. I have not really succeeded entirely, but I have come up with what I think is a reasonable compromise.
I have focused on spending a half hour each day focused on the mechanics of the instrument and making music, and then allowing myself to spend any remaining time just playing around (hopefully putting to good use what I spent that half hour on). It seems to me that one possible approach may be to let the "playing around" drive what I focus on for the mechanics. In other words, if I hear in my head something that I want to be able to play on my instrument, then that half hour might be spent on figuring out how to do that (i.e. the techniques required to make that happen such as a bit more left and right hand independence on the keyboard so I can play a bass line in the left hand while playing something with my right at the same time). Really, such an approach would fuse the two distinctly separate activities of learning and playing into one, where the learning is directly translated into what I want to play.
Is there really a point to learning something that I will not use (at least in the immediate future)? If I need to learn some specific thing later on, then I could learn it then. I have watched people who seem to naturally fuse the two activities of learning and playing together. Invariably, such people seem to be driven to recreate whatever music they hear in their head, and stop to learn how to do something that will enable that, whether it is learning how to "spell" some chord or scale they need at that moment or some technique that will enable them to play whatever it is they are trying to get out onto their instrument.
That, to me, is the ideal learning environment - the music comes first if one is to truly be creative. As it so often happens, we tend to get into the mechanics of playing the instrument and shutdown that creative, exploring side in favor of technique. While technique has its place, it is the creative, exploring side that is really what this is all about. Do we really want to forgo that so we can dutifully mimic what some other creative person has already done?
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Hurdles to the learning process
Today, I want to write about hurdles to the learning process. So far, we have talked about the learning process in terms of the types of methods available to learn to play piano, with honorable mention to Robert Conti for his jazz guitar teaching materials. But, what happens on a day to day basis when you have chosen a particular instrument and path to follow?
There are two very good books that I would recommend anyone following this blog to read:
1. Mastery by George Leonard.
The essence of this book is that our culture is one in which long term goals and the consistency required to achieve them is becoming less and less commonly practiced. If you want to add richness and depth to your life, the book suggests and discusses choosing a long term practice within which to grow. Such a practice can be a martial art or other sport such as tennis, playing a musical instrument, or anything that you desire to pursue for the long term. This book discusses how the mass media message is completely opposite of anything that such a pursuit would stand for, and how you can succeed in such a pursuit despite what everybody else may or may not be doing, and why it is in your best interests in terms of personal growth to do so.
2. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
This book is about our internal resistance to doing the very thing that we were meant to do. It is about defeating this resistance and moving forward with our art. It is a "no holds barred" type of book that challenges you to move past your internal resistance and pursue your life's purpose and your art (which may be the same thing). One of the major forms of resistance Pressfield talks about is "avoidance" - doing anything BUT the pursuit of your art.
These two books are worth reading annually so that you keep their ideas firmly in mind, because these ideas are really helpful and you WILL be putting them into practice whether you read these books or not - if you are really working with your chosen piano method. Therefore, having a source of practical wisdom in your pursuit certainly can't hurt.
The concept of "avoidance" is particularly interesting, because Pressfield talks about how many years he wasted running away from his art of writing, and how much trouble the "blank page" has caused in so many lives. Avoidance is anything that you do instead of working on your chosen piano method. When you get home from work or school, do you eagerly go to the piano, or do you read and post in various forums and/or newsgroups?
Participating in forums and/or newsgroups is not a bad thing at all. In fact, it is a wonderful support network for exchanging ideas, keeping each other on track, and sharing each other's frustrations and victories. The likelihood of finding that .05% of the population in your town who share your goals and interests is slim, depending on the size of town or city you live in, or how far you are from a reasonably sized city. But finding that .05% of the world's population who share your goals and interests is pretty good, and they tend to congregate in forums and newsgroups for that purpose.
However, when that online participation REPLACES your own pursuit of your goals - that is avoidance. We know we are "avoiding" when we feel guilty or realize that we have not played the piano for several days, which then turns into weeks, and on and on until finally, we are posting in a newsgroup or forum that we "got away" from our pursuit but are now ready to jump back in. Sometimes, life circumstances will interfere, but sometimes, it is our own avoidance that interferes. Self-honesty is the way to really know the difference, and that is where books such as "Mastery" and "The War of Art" are very helpful in recognizing which is which. What we do about it is up to us individually.
We have all seen really silly "flame wars" erupt in newsgroups, and sometimes in forums, though less so if they are well moderated. I believe that these flame wars are really often an outlet for the frustrations people experience when they know they are not following their chosen path and feel powerless to do anything about it.
Each time we miss a practice session, it gets easier to miss it again. The days and weeks add up. We may find ourselves participating in the forums and newsgroups as if we were making progress, but we know the truth and it convicts us. We become frustrated with ourselves - why can't I "make myself sit down to practice"? We may take that frustration out on other people in the form of online flame wars over non-essential points. I have seen real arguments over which artist is better, whether a certain type of music is "valid", whether a person SHOULD learn theory and reading, etc, etc. These could be avoided if a person is "comfortable in their own skin" and doing what they need to do to get on with their own lives.
Sometimes, in the pursuit of a goal such as learning to play piano, a person comes face to face with his or her real motivations and finds that this is not really a priority for them. There is nothing wrong with this. During periods when I have taught guitar, I have found that some students, once they find out how much effort is really involved in playing an instrument, decide that maybe they would rather do something else with their lives. There is no shame in this. If anything, it is honorable that they explored it. In so doing, they will eventually find their own calling, and will successfully pursue that.
On the other hand, it is also possible that a person really does want to learn to play an instrument, but is afraid that s/he will ultimately fail, or is simply conditioned to avoid anything that requires long term effort outside of the workplace. The book Mastery talks about this in detail. It is important to understand that most people feel similar frustrations and experience the same setbacks during the course of a long term pursuit, regardless of what that pursuit is. It is also important to understand ourselves well enough to know the difference between really knowing that a particular pursuit is not really our pursuit, and when a pursuit is our calling, but we are simply too lazy to make the effort. Self-knowledge is a good thing to acquire - and we do so by experiencing new things and learning from those experiences.
As one of the members at the PianoMagic forums said, my blog could really be called "A Journey Into Life". A journey into music is really a journey into life itself, and in the process of that journey, we find out who we are.
There are two very good books that I would recommend anyone following this blog to read:
1. Mastery by George Leonard.
The essence of this book is that our culture is one in which long term goals and the consistency required to achieve them is becoming less and less commonly practiced. If you want to add richness and depth to your life, the book suggests and discusses choosing a long term practice within which to grow. Such a practice can be a martial art or other sport such as tennis, playing a musical instrument, or anything that you desire to pursue for the long term. This book discusses how the mass media message is completely opposite of anything that such a pursuit would stand for, and how you can succeed in such a pursuit despite what everybody else may or may not be doing, and why it is in your best interests in terms of personal growth to do so.
2. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
This book is about our internal resistance to doing the very thing that we were meant to do. It is about defeating this resistance and moving forward with our art. It is a "no holds barred" type of book that challenges you to move past your internal resistance and pursue your life's purpose and your art (which may be the same thing). One of the major forms of resistance Pressfield talks about is "avoidance" - doing anything BUT the pursuit of your art.
These two books are worth reading annually so that you keep their ideas firmly in mind, because these ideas are really helpful and you WILL be putting them into practice whether you read these books or not - if you are really working with your chosen piano method. Therefore, having a source of practical wisdom in your pursuit certainly can't hurt.
The concept of "avoidance" is particularly interesting, because Pressfield talks about how many years he wasted running away from his art of writing, and how much trouble the "blank page" has caused in so many lives. Avoidance is anything that you do instead of working on your chosen piano method. When you get home from work or school, do you eagerly go to the piano, or do you read and post in various forums and/or newsgroups?
Participating in forums and/or newsgroups is not a bad thing at all. In fact, it is a wonderful support network for exchanging ideas, keeping each other on track, and sharing each other's frustrations and victories. The likelihood of finding that .05% of the population in your town who share your goals and interests is slim, depending on the size of town or city you live in, or how far you are from a reasonably sized city. But finding that .05% of the world's population who share your goals and interests is pretty good, and they tend to congregate in forums and newsgroups for that purpose.
However, when that online participation REPLACES your own pursuit of your goals - that is avoidance. We know we are "avoiding" when we feel guilty or realize that we have not played the piano for several days, which then turns into weeks, and on and on until finally, we are posting in a newsgroup or forum that we "got away" from our pursuit but are now ready to jump back in. Sometimes, life circumstances will interfere, but sometimes, it is our own avoidance that interferes. Self-honesty is the way to really know the difference, and that is where books such as "Mastery" and "The War of Art" are very helpful in recognizing which is which. What we do about it is up to us individually.
We have all seen really silly "flame wars" erupt in newsgroups, and sometimes in forums, though less so if they are well moderated. I believe that these flame wars are really often an outlet for the frustrations people experience when they know they are not following their chosen path and feel powerless to do anything about it.
Each time we miss a practice session, it gets easier to miss it again. The days and weeks add up. We may find ourselves participating in the forums and newsgroups as if we were making progress, but we know the truth and it convicts us. We become frustrated with ourselves - why can't I "make myself sit down to practice"? We may take that frustration out on other people in the form of online flame wars over non-essential points. I have seen real arguments over which artist is better, whether a certain type of music is "valid", whether a person SHOULD learn theory and reading, etc, etc. These could be avoided if a person is "comfortable in their own skin" and doing what they need to do to get on with their own lives.
Sometimes, in the pursuit of a goal such as learning to play piano, a person comes face to face with his or her real motivations and finds that this is not really a priority for them. There is nothing wrong with this. During periods when I have taught guitar, I have found that some students, once they find out how much effort is really involved in playing an instrument, decide that maybe they would rather do something else with their lives. There is no shame in this. If anything, it is honorable that they explored it. In so doing, they will eventually find their own calling, and will successfully pursue that.
On the other hand, it is also possible that a person really does want to learn to play an instrument, but is afraid that s/he will ultimately fail, or is simply conditioned to avoid anything that requires long term effort outside of the workplace. The book Mastery talks about this in detail. It is important to understand that most people feel similar frustrations and experience the same setbacks during the course of a long term pursuit, regardless of what that pursuit is. It is also important to understand ourselves well enough to know the difference between really knowing that a particular pursuit is not really our pursuit, and when a pursuit is our calling, but we are simply too lazy to make the effort. Self-knowledge is a good thing to acquire - and we do so by experiencing new things and learning from those experiences.
As one of the members at the PianoMagic forums said, my blog could really be called "A Journey Into Life". A journey into music is really a journey into life itself, and in the process of that journey, we find out who we are.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
When deciding to learn to play an instrument (any instrument!!) as an adult, we need to accept that we are embarking on a journey, rather than a clearly defined project with a start point, a definitive end point, and a calculated time frame. If we are not able to accept this, we are setting ourselves up for a lot of unnecessary frustration. This is really self-defeating since we would normally wish to learn to play an instrument for relaxation as a way of separating a corner of our lives from the normal everyday stuff that constitute our responsibilities as adults.
In addition to all the "myths" about music that we have to overcome, or at least prove to ourselves that we can "rise above" them and simply have fun learning to make music, we have to sift through a myriad of various types of courses that all clamor for our attention and dollars. If we decide to go with a teacher in traditional one-on-one lessons, we then have the task of finding a suitable teacher. As with any of the self-teaching methods, finding a suitable teacher involves finding that person with whom we are compatible in terms of personality, teaching style, and the ability to effectively teach what we want to learn. Not everybody will therefore be happy with the same type of teacher.
Any of these selection processes requires work on our part and the willingness to experiment. We need to examine ourselves to find out who we are in terms of our true musical goals and how we seem to best learn. This is not a "cut and dried" process, and it may take trying a number of different approaches to learning using the process of elimination to find out what does and does not work for us. Patience is a virtue when going through this process. Sometimes, we are lucky and we find a suitable teacher or course right away. More often, we end up dong at least some experimenting.
If we set about this whole enterprise with the mindset that we are involved to have fun, then our attitude will be such that we allow ourselves to try a bit of this and that, "playing the field" a bit before settling down (unless of course we find the right thing for us right away). Through this process, we are already learning a lot of what we need to know about ourselves to be successful.
One of the worst things we can do is consider those learning situations that didn't work out, as wasted time. They weren't. Instead, we may have actually learned a bit about music making, but more likely, a lot about what doesn't work for us. Until we try it, we won't know.
We want to reach a point where we are sure about the direction we are taking, trusting that it will get us at least part way to where we want to be. Even if we decide to change direction in a few weeks or months down the road, we will have learned something in the process. At some point, we will find what we are looking for, refining both our musical goals and our self-knowledge along the way - so that we recognize it when we have found the right situation, and we will also therefore recognize when that situation is no longer working for us.
Ultimately, we teach ourselves. A teacher, whether it is a book, CD/DVD, or live teacher, is a guide to help us discover for ourselves how to teach ourselves what we need to know. Nobody can do the real teaching for us. They can only guide us. It is up to us individually to internalize and make use of that information. So, ultimately, we are responsible for our progress and enjoyment of this enterprise of learning to play an instrument. We alone can make it as fun or as miserable as we wish. When we come to grips with this fact, we will see the whole enterprise from a whole new perspective, and will get far more out of it as a result.
We will no longer look for a "silver bullet" - that one more thing that will magically make us play like we dream about, or sound like our favorite artist. Instead, we will settle down to doing those things that we need to attend to if we are really going to make a run for our musical goals. We are then taking charge of our musical destiny and enlisting the help of other people in the form of teachers and learning materials. We will always get out of it what we put into it. With the proper attitude, we will always be willing to put in the work, and will therefore ultimately reap the rewards of our efforts.
Tony
In addition to all the "myths" about music that we have to overcome, or at least prove to ourselves that we can "rise above" them and simply have fun learning to make music, we have to sift through a myriad of various types of courses that all clamor for our attention and dollars. If we decide to go with a teacher in traditional one-on-one lessons, we then have the task of finding a suitable teacher. As with any of the self-teaching methods, finding a suitable teacher involves finding that person with whom we are compatible in terms of personality, teaching style, and the ability to effectively teach what we want to learn. Not everybody will therefore be happy with the same type of teacher.
Any of these selection processes requires work on our part and the willingness to experiment. We need to examine ourselves to find out who we are in terms of our true musical goals and how we seem to best learn. This is not a "cut and dried" process, and it may take trying a number of different approaches to learning using the process of elimination to find out what does and does not work for us. Patience is a virtue when going through this process. Sometimes, we are lucky and we find a suitable teacher or course right away. More often, we end up dong at least some experimenting.
If we set about this whole enterprise with the mindset that we are involved to have fun, then our attitude will be such that we allow ourselves to try a bit of this and that, "playing the field" a bit before settling down (unless of course we find the right thing for us right away). Through this process, we are already learning a lot of what we need to know about ourselves to be successful.
One of the worst things we can do is consider those learning situations that didn't work out, as wasted time. They weren't. Instead, we may have actually learned a bit about music making, but more likely, a lot about what doesn't work for us. Until we try it, we won't know.
We want to reach a point where we are sure about the direction we are taking, trusting that it will get us at least part way to where we want to be. Even if we decide to change direction in a few weeks or months down the road, we will have learned something in the process. At some point, we will find what we are looking for, refining both our musical goals and our self-knowledge along the way - so that we recognize it when we have found the right situation, and we will also therefore recognize when that situation is no longer working for us.
Ultimately, we teach ourselves. A teacher, whether it is a book, CD/DVD, or live teacher, is a guide to help us discover for ourselves how to teach ourselves what we need to know. Nobody can do the real teaching for us. They can only guide us. It is up to us individually to internalize and make use of that information. So, ultimately, we are responsible for our progress and enjoyment of this enterprise of learning to play an instrument. We alone can make it as fun or as miserable as we wish. When we come to grips with this fact, we will see the whole enterprise from a whole new perspective, and will get far more out of it as a result.
We will no longer look for a "silver bullet" - that one more thing that will magically make us play like we dream about, or sound like our favorite artist. Instead, we will settle down to doing those things that we need to attend to if we are really going to make a run for our musical goals. We are then taking charge of our musical destiny and enlisting the help of other people in the form of teachers and learning materials. We will always get out of it what we put into it. With the proper attitude, we will always be willing to put in the work, and will therefore ultimately reap the rewards of our efforts.
Tony
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)