Here’s a letter to Duane from a student who took the first 4 lessons of the year-long Crash Course. Please read it carefully as it explains why some piano lessons really work and why most don't: (click here to see his actual letter, just in case you wonder if we're making this up!

                                                                                                                                                          Saturday 4-8-2006

Dear Duane:

     I loved the first month – thank you. It seems so simple to play this way. After only 4 weeks of lessons, I am playing songs by ear without even looking at music. (I’m the fellow who wrote you in an email saying I’d had a year of lessons as a kid, and that I wanted to play jazz piano, and asking about which “path” thru your courses I should take. You recommended that I should start at the beginning, even though the material would seem repetitious at first, since it was good to be sure we’d cover all the bases.)

     Well, as exciting and fun and encouraging as my childhood teacher was *, she never put things together this way – theory and chord knowledge fused together with technique and playing songs. I just memorized things like a player piano – and later forgot them. You really have me enjoying piano when I come home each day, knowing I already know C, G7, F, and D7. I know I could sit down anywhere and (in the key of C, at least), play any simple song. Oddly enough, I knew these 3 chords (not D7) all my life, and yet I somehow still couldn’t really put a technique together for somehow approaching any 2 or 3 (or 4) chorded song in C. But your approach, starting with a “pointer” chord, and then later moving up to a better sounding inversion, then adding what you call a “pointer bass” – I am taking this and running and applying it to all the previous songs and playing them this way, too, as you say.

     And I can’t believe it, but in 4 weeks – after 28 years of exasperation – I am seeing slow, steady, -- and what appears to well be permanent – improvement in my piano playing. You have clearly: 1. thought about how to break piano-playing down into its essential components (most excellent pianists still have not done this), and: 2. Figured out/engineered a “path” through those components which is linear, step-by-step, and can be communicated simply.

     What a gift this is.

     So thank you for this approach, and I’d like to get the rest of the year. I’m really looking forward to learning more and more from you, and enjoying a lifetime of piano playing.

                                                                        Yours,

                                                                        Jeffrey A. Stern, PhD

                                                                        Anaheim, CA

*And I tried another in-person lesson recently, but they did not have your organized, linear approach, either, so I gave up with them too.

******

And another letter to Bev later (April 17^th, 2006) after ordering the rest of the Crash Course:

Hey, Bev!

     Thanks much for both the tracking number and marking the box sig-required/alt-other units. I do appreciate your attention to these details.

     Also, let me tell you have I’ve missed the lessons! (Between the time he took his first month of lessons and the time he ordered and received the balance of the course). I love Duane’s methodology and his thoughts in breaking out the components of a “complex knowledge space” (piano playing) and then figuring out how to teach/relay these components in a linear, ordered way.

     Many people have said that many songs resolve to a few simple chords and a way to play the left and right hands, but none had shown how (much less SEVERAL how’s). Duane has, and for that I am eternally grateful.

     After four lessons, I can see now how his approach is going to lead step-by-step into more and more complicated (and fun-sounding) techniques – but they are all related. I am even seeing music differently, already in 4 short weeks I am playing so much better than before – even going to the piano and just using the “pointer bass” and ¾ chords on so many songs, even neighbors are stopping by saying keep going. They love it. Well, so do I! Thanks to Duane for simplifying piano, and for all you do on the web site, mailings, and everything to get Duane’s teaching to us. I am looking forward to lesson #5!

     Once again, thank you both.

Jeff Stern, PhD