Guitar Pedagogy

I recently had a lesson with a student who has been playing guitar for a little while, but has never learned to read. He’s comfortable with most open chords, a few barre chords, and he even knows some scales in open position. He’s determined, but he has a tendancy to get overwhelmed of I throw too much at him at once, but he’s getting more and more interested in improvisation and jazz tunes, and at every turn I’ve been thinking that he would advance a lot faster in those areas if I could write stuff down for him.

The Same Old Story

I think this kind of situation if fairly common for guitar students. It’s the love of and curiosity about music that got them to pick up the guitar in the first place that pushes them to want more out of playing than just strumming along to their favorite songs. Unfortunately, guitar teachers usually handle these students one of two ways: 1) They say, “Sure, I’ll teach you how to play jazz and read music,” and then put them through the ringer with sightreading, lead sheets, and theory, as if they were students at a university program OR 2) They say “Ugh, too much trouble - let me show you a system called tablature…

Beware the Tab

The first scenario is likely to frustrate a student pretty quickly. The “conservatory” approach, even for serious musicians who are IN a conservatory, can quickly turn music into nothing but hard work and drudgery. The second scenario is likely to produce yet another tablature robot like those that fill music stores with the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” but can’t play with other musicians. In the short term, tablature produces results more quickly than note-reading, but in my opinion it’s just as frustrating in the longterm.

Show them how it’s useful

So the other day, with my student, I tried to think of ways that we could work in notation as a tool that would be helpful instead of just an arbitrary exercise. My instinct was to start with one element at a time, to try to break things down as much as possible. This is trickier than it seems at first, if you think about it, since reading even a simple melody requires an understanding of the way the notes are placed on the staff and the duration of the notes.

Stick with a steady beat

So the question was whether or not to learn notes without rhythm or rhythm without notes. I suppose you can make a case for the latter, but as I find that rhythm is understudied in general (see the one-chord song article), I went for the latter.

Take them where they want to go

So I tried to think of a way to incorporate rhythmic reading into something that we were already working on. My student’s been asking me about jazz tunes, so I brought him the chord changes with quarter-notes written underneath. I pointed out that the quarter notes were like instructions on how to “feel” the chord changes - in other words, they gave more detailed information then just writing out a list of chords.

Now Subdivide

Ok, so I knew going in there that quarter-notes weren’t going to be a problem. No big deal - it’s just on the beat, right? I wanted to move a little bit further, but I didn’t want to just be giving a lecture; I wanted to be sure that my student was understanding things a bit. I also wanted to bring in eighth-notes. So I pulled out another sheet of paper and wrote the rhythm of “We Will Rock You,” but I didn’t tell him what it was. I explained a bit about the eighth-notes that I had written, we tried playing a few measures of straight eighth-notes, and then I asked him to see if he could play me the rhythm that I wrote and guess what tune it might be. He didn’t get it right away, but once he had the rhythm down I played the melody at the same time, and he smiled, “Oh yeah, I love that tune!”

On to Part 2…

It then occurred to me that the chorus of “We Will Rock You” might be a great place to start with for note reading, since it’s only got 4 different notes and it’s rhythmically simple…but I thought I’d better save it for the following week.

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