Self-Help Piano Lessons Are Company’s Forte : Dick Fabian’s interest in the instrument led him and his instructor, musician George Miladin, to develop a teach-yourself course.

Dick Ribble is the typical See & Hear customer.

He took piano lessons as a boy but lost interest. He soon forgot how to read music, much less play it. Then, at age 65 and headed for retirement, he found himself yearning to revive the avocation he had neglected for 50 years.

“As I gradually wind down my career, I hope to pursue more of the things I want to do and fewer of the things I have to do,” said the business appraiser, who lives in Dana Point.

Earlier this year, Ribble saw an advertisement for a teach-yourself piano course, See & Hear. Within months, it promised, your repertoire could include 14 well-known melodies--among them Brahms’ “Lullaby,” “The Entertainer” and “Silent Night.” Intrigued, he sent in his $100 check for a package of instructional cassette tapes and music sheets.

“They start you out with a simple version of ‘Happy Birthday,’ then you work up to a five-minute concert version,” he said. Now he’s learning “Georgia.” “It’s wonderful,” Ribble said, “although I should be practicing more.”

In its four years, the See & Hear program has attracted about 130,000 pupils, its creator says. Widely plugged through half-hour “infomercials” on cable television, the tapes are expected to ring up $4 million in sales this year.

The business, based in Huntington Beach, began with someone in a situation not unlike Ribble’s. Dick Fabian, 68, a financial adviser who publishes a monthly newsletter about mutual funds, had dreamed for years of playing the piano.

He forced his children to take lessons, hoping he would “learn by osmosis,” Fabian said. But, as do many youngsters, they abandoned the piano by the time they were teens. “Traditional piano lessons bore people to death,” he said. “There is no other area in the field of education that has a higher failure rate.”

A few years ago, Fabian finally signed up for his own private lessons. He was not an easy student, he admits. He jumped from teacher to teacher, demanding more to show for his efforts than “just scales and finger exercises.”

“I intimidated them,” he said with obvious pride. “I told them, ‘I want to learn to play in this lifetime songs that I enjoy.’ ”

One morning, after speaking at a financial investment seminar, Fabian took note of an impressive pianist who performed during intermission. “I heard someone oohing and aahing, and I looked up and there was Dick,” recalled George Miladin, 70, a Presbyterian pastor in San Diego and a professional musician who once played trumpet in Lawrence Welk’s band. “He said, ‘I wish I could play like that.’ ”

The two men got to talking, and Fabian expressed his disillusionment with standard lessons. They struck a deal: Fabian would provide Miladin financial counsel in return for piano lessons that focused on recognizable songs rather than tedious exercises.

Fabian soon mastered a few familiar pieces and became so excited by the method that he decided to market it. In Miladin’s step-by-step program, novices listen to a song on tape, pick it out on the keyboard with two fingers, then gradually embellish it.

“What adult student wants to sit down at the piano one hour a day for six months--yet come up pretty much empty--with music that doesn’t sound very interesting?” Miladin asked. “We provide legitimate shortcuts.”

Ross Whitney, director of the Music Media Center at UC Irvine, agreed that the routine method of teaching piano often leads to ennui. “Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, with a lot of drilling and boring discipline,” he said. “When students get thrown all these idiotic tunes they don’t recognize, it kills the whole joy of learning--especially for older people.”

See & Hear also offers an advanced course for people who have graduated from the first one or who already have some experience playing.

Though the tapes have brought in millions of dollars in revenue, most of that money has been funneled into advertising, said Fabian, who is president of the 10-employee company, the See & Hear Piano Series.

“We haven’t gotten rich off this yet,” he said. “It’s still mostly another hobby for me.”

No one pretends that the rather simplistic method of teaching piano will turn students into concert musicians. “These people are not going to appear onstage--they just want to derive enjoyment from playing pleasant tunes,” Miladin said. “There’s a phrase I use to describe the program: ‘Technically unsophisticated but musically satisfying.’ ”