Teaching a Group Guitar Lesson

Teaching a group guitar lesson is one of the more difficult scenarios of guitar instruction. With more than one person, you will have to deal with the fact that all of the students will be at different levels and have different amounts of commitment. This may create some challenging situations, but with a solid plan and a few helpful strategies, teaching a group lesson can be a rewarding and enjoyable experience for a guitar instructor. This article will detail how to prepare for and operate a group guitar lesson.

Usually groups lessons are situated by basic skill level. Most people interested in group lessons will be beginners or somewhere between beginner and intermediate. This means that some of the students in the group will be completely new to the instrument and may not be able to progress very fast. At the same time, other students may have a little experience and a little more natural hand coordination and pick things up quickly. So how do you make the lesson interesting for both types?

One of the best strategies is to even things out in the same way that golf players do, with a sort of handicap system. Instead of adding strokes to the better players score, make the exercises easier for the students who are having a harder time. If you are trying to get the group to play a chord progression together, have the students who can play the full chords and tell the rest to play just the root notes until they are faster with the chords.

What you don’t want to do is split the group up and essentially give everyone a short private lesson while the whole group is there. Although there are obviously some times when you will want to give a player some quick individual help, you want to keep the group together as much as possible so that no one is just waiting for the next exercise for too long, or just sitting around while you help one of the weaker players catch up. Make it clear to the students having trouble that they need to practice certain things on their own time but keep them with the group by giving them a simplified version of the current practice.

Another problem of group lessons that should not be ignored is tuning. With a room full of guitar players trying to play exercises and songs together, tuning is essential. However, tuning is also surprisingly difficult with this many inexperienced players. They haven’t developed an ear for tuning yet and may not even know how to tune the guitar yet if they are pure beginners. In order not to let too much of the lesson be taken up by tuning, you have to have an effective method of getting it done fast.

The best thing to do is to tell all of the players to arrive on time and with their instruments already in tune. Show those who don’t know how on their first lessons and make them know that it is their responsibility from now on. However, even though every player may be tuned and ready to go when the lessons starts you should still check everyone’s tuning and get that out of the way. To do this, make sure your guitar is in tune and just have them play their open strings one at a time along with you, helping them with any slight adjustments they need to make along the way.

With these things in mind, the rest of the group lesson will be determined by your students and what you want to accomplish with them. Make sure that all the players are using correct technique and posture, as these facts should be hammered home early in a player’s development. Beyond that, give them a good mix of basic scales, chords, and simple progressions to get used to. Always insert some kind of creative playing into the lesson for the group to do as a whole to remind them why they are practicing.

You may want to get some of them improvising over the chordal accompaniment of the others. This idea can be simplified enough to work with any group, and it will give the players some exiting performance experience. Remember that your group lessons can be fun and entertaining for all of the students even while they are learning things.

Group lessons require more of a worked out plan ahead of time and its important to have a lot of ideas about what the group can do to make the lessons fun. If you work things out and adapt to the group, it should be a great experience, and as a guitar instructor it is a great way to pick up more students for your private lessons.

January 08 2010 | Guitar Instruction | No Comments »