Now THAT was a very honest and fair reply, Ragtime Clown. I am impressed!
...and I hope Richard takes your words to heart and decides to get into the Sudnow method too.
I just want to remind you that you CAN work on the Sudnow method by yourself and discuss it here in the forums. I am not saying anything about you or your past experience here, but instead highlighting the fact that Sudnow originally designed the course to be essentially done in isolation with the OPTION of people getting together to form a (sort of) study group. What you would do is make time every day to just plunk away at those chord shapes until they start to sound like songs. Sudnow modified his course presentation (but not the basic facts or materials regarding voicing and that stuff) - his manner of speaking. Originally, the recording of the seminar had a lot more of his philosophizing in it, where he talked about the need to go off by yourself for extended periods and just work the material out day by day.
Sudnow described the learning process as per his method as a "Zen-like" approach that is unlike anything that our culture is really ready to embrace. He took a lot of that stuff out in later versions of the recorded seminar, but I am telling you about it here so that, if you have the Sudnow materials, you will know that you can forge ahead on your own - because that is how Sudnow conceived the course. The site and everything about it came MUCH later - by at least 10 or 15 years. Sure, it would be helpful to be able to talk to the folks there - but it is not a necessity. In fact, forums can be a distraction and a way of avoiding actually sitting down to the piano regularly. I don't mean that as being directed at you at all. I do mean that this is a fact of human nature. Though Sudnow did not talk about forums and the internet in his course (because he developed it before these were commonplace), he did talk about doing essentially the same type of "avoidance" (a term from the "War of Art" by Steven Pressman) in the form of TV watching and that sort of thing.
You have apparently been taking lessons and made progress in that direction. Whether you are or are not doing that now, that experience will go a long way to helping you get off on the right foot with the Sudnow method. I had no lessons and there were no groups during the first year that I worked with the method. Yet, at the end of that year, I had both "Misty" and "As Time Goes By" AND (because there were no other "dot songs" back then), three or four of my own well in hand. I actually got away from the "hard core" Sudnow method through my involvement with the Sudnow group. That was not the fault of the group at the time, but instead because I wanted to do other stuff by then, and exactly as Sudnow predicted, I got away from it altogether until much later. ...lessons to be learned.
I sincerely hope that bit of information/insight is helpful for you.
Tony
