" If you can't read music, you'll never play the piano. "

After almost a year of piano lessons and still unable to play the first few measures of Long, Long Ago (TH Bayly), my piano teacher finally concluded, "If you can't read music, you'll never be able to play the piano."

I was 7 years old.

My problem was not that I could not read music. It was that I could not read music fast enough. Each note in the treble clef would instantly prompt me to recite 'every good boy does fine.' If there were three notes, I would recite it three times. Then there's the bass clef - reading the notes here terrified me. Giving me the task of reading sheet music to play the piano is like telling  a first grader to read Tolstoy's War and Peace in a day.

My piano teacher's words of discouragement stuck with me for decades. I learned the guitar instead and I learned it really well. With the guitar, I did not need to read music. Instead, I learned the chords and accompanied myself singing. Later on, I learned the finger pick style, allowing me to play instrumental pieces without the burden of reading sheet music.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I thought about taking the piano up again.  Dozens of famous musicians, I have learned, could not read music. But yet they played the piano really well.

Thus started my search for a system that would allow me to play piano despite my teacher's pronouncement.