How to Teach Uncoordinated Guitar Beginners

Guitar teachers, and music teachers in general will at some point need to teach beginning players who are especially uncoordinated. These students may have trouble starting with the basic open guitar chords, or even simple power chords. So what do you teach them? It is important to remember that guitar technique can be very difficult and unnatural for many people, so you need to start them with things that anyone can do. This article will talk about a few tips for teaching these beginners in a way that lets them play something musical even when they first get started.

The nice thing about the guitar is that there are open strings that can easily be played. These strings can be used to create some simple chords and arpeggios that sound very musical, and even quite impressive, despite the fact that they only require one note to be fretted at once. For example, fretting the G on the high E string can produce a G major chord when the top three strings are played. As a teacher, you should look for ways to simplify all of the basic chords to make them easier for beginning students to play.

The open strings can also be used in combination with a single note line to create an arpeggio with some motion in it. These can sound very nice to everyone, but beginning students will be especially pleased with what they can easily create on the instrument, and this will inspire them to keep learning and practicing.

In general, the open strings of the guitar can be the easiest way to create complex and very rich sounding chords, with as little as one or two fretted notes. Playing some of the notes higher up on the fretboard will produce some interesting chords in both pitch and timbre, since the open strings have a different tonal characteristic than fretted notes being plucked.

It really helps people just starting out on the instrument when they see that they are capable of playing something that sounds good right off the bat, so as a teacher, you should look for things to teach them that are easy and enjoyable, rather than the standard single note lines and boring blues progressions that most people start out with.

No one will want to continue learning the instrument if they cannot make any music in the beginning, but if you can get a student playing something with little effort, and something that even someone with very little musical talent can play, you will find that they are more motivated and eager to keep learning, and not only is this a good thing in itself, but it will help you keep more paying students as a music teacher as well.

April 20 2010 | Guitar Instruction

Teaching Kids How to Play Guitar

Anyone interested in being a guitar instructor should be ready to teach children. The guitar is a popular instrument for kids, and at most music stores, younger children make up a significant part of the student base. Though it may not sound like it at first, teaching kids how to play guitar can actually be more challenging in many regards than teaching adults. This article will go over a few of the issues with children learning the instrument and some tips for how to approach the process.

The first thing to understand is that the guitar is not an easy instrument. Anyone who has been playing for a while, and who may have started playing at an older age, may have forgotten how difficult it can be just to play a single note with proper technique. Spend just a few minutes teaching a young child how to play a single note and you will be reminded convincingly.

Kids have a hard time playing whole chords on the guitar, and many teachers may be used to starting out with the basic open chords. With children, you need to start out even simpler. This means teaching them whatever chords you can that only involve one fretted note. Even trying to get them to fret two notes at once may be pushing it with some students.

The same is true of scales. You will have a hard time getting some younger students to learn full scales, and it will be hard to convince them to practice scales at all. Instead, work on getting them to play simple melodies that they might be familiar with. A lot of beginning guitar books will have examples of these, but you may want to find some more contemporary tunes that the students will connect with.

One more thing to consider is that kids are likely to forget what you have told them to work on, so you should always have chord sheets to give to them or some type of handout that has their assignment recorded. Their parents will also be given some type of proof that they are being taught something just by seeing them with some papers, so it will help keep them enrolled, and prove that when a student refuses to practice something, it is not because you haven’t assigned anything.

Another challenging aspect of teaching kids is that some of them may have trouble expressing what types of music they want to learn about, or what specific songs they enjoy. This could be for a number of reasons, and it may just be that their parents are making them take lessons and they don’t have a burning desire to work on anything specific. In any case, children are going to be much less clear with the direction they want to go in their lessons and you are going to have to try to steer them yourself.

It can be challenging teaching kids guitar because of the physical limitations of their smaller hands and weaker coordination, but also because they are less prone to self motivation and will often avoid practicing anything that does not have instant gratification. To combat this, you are going to have to veil whatever you can with some type of instant gratification.

All of this being said, teaching children how to play any instrument can be very satisfying despite the different challenges it offers. You might be starting a great future musician or composer down their path, and at the very least, you are giving them something constructive to do with some of their time. Try to find ways to make the lessons interesting and fun for you and the student, and it should become an enjoyable experience.

March 17 2010 | Guitar Instruction

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