I have been playing guitar for 38 years and teaching since I was in high school. I have taught guita
My student Karson has been absolutely devouring his guitar lessons since he began a couple of years ago. He always goes the extra mile on everything we do, consistently practices hard, always looks for new challenges and his progress on the guitar and music just blows me away. And recently he has been tearing it up on various stages! Watch him and his up-and-coming fellow rock stars do their thing! I could not be more proud to have him as my student.
My student Diego has always more or less focused on the classical guitar. However, more recently we have also been learning latin and bossa nova pieces like this one called "Blue Bossa". Unlike in classical music, there is usually an improvisation section after playing a song's main theme or melody and it can be tricky playing over the chord changes in more "jazzy" tunes like this one. It's a lot like an obstacle course where "wrong" notes are obvious and you are trying to smoothly solo using the "right" notes over each changing chord... Anyway, this was our first song really focusing on this kind of playing. Diego really nailed it! Check him out!
BREAKTHROUGH SERIES #1!
Naturally, people learning how to play the guitar want to be able to see what their fingers are doing at all times. Otherwise, they are afraid they will hit wrong notes. Sometimes, though this can mean students hold the guitar in an awkward way in order to see what their left-hand is doing. At a certain point I tell them that their fingers have actually been learning where to go all on their own. So I will sometimes have students do exercises with their eyes closed or just looking away from their hands as they play.
Here is my student Josh discovering in real-time that his fingers know what they're doing even though he's playing a pretty tricky warm-up exercise!
08/30/2023
I meant to post this a while back... This was so nice and unexpected!
07/25/2023
I usually start beginner students with playing famous, classic melodies like "Ode to Joy", "Happy Birthday", "Hallelujah" etc. It builds dexterity, strength and coordination in a gradual, fun way. And this is usually written in something called tablature which is kind of shorthand for reading and writing music for the guitar. (Actually reading music on guitar takes quite a bit of time and effort so I usually wait a few months to get into this.) Basically, this tablature "shorthand" is a picture of the guitar strings and numbers for the frets you press.
I've never had a student do this before but as you can see, my student Gus here did some research online and found the melody for Pokémon. He then said he took several hours to write out the melody in tablature for himself to practice. Amazing initiative!! Very proud of him!
I have heard the expression 'give the gift of music' before which could mean a lot of things. For me, though this video of my student Vincent sums it up... We had learned to play the early guitar rock classic "Wild Thing" and usually after learning the guitar part the student and I will play it together and I'll sing. (That's what it's all about, right? Sittin' around strumming and singing songs!) Anyway, out of the blue during our lesson Vincent asked if we could play "Wild Thing" and he started singing on his own! (Singing and playing is really hard at first - I spent a year or so in college trying to learn to do it...) So this blew me away and I recorded it. (Edited slightly for length.) A natural rock star!!
Normally after working on several melodies (with one note at a time) we will ease into playing chords on the guitar which is a huge jump. My student Gus has only been playing guitar for a couple of months but blazed through all the intro melodies very quickly and so we started his first chord song... Switching chords and playing with a steady rhythm is very challenging at first but check out his natural groove and chord playing! Very proud of him!
Check out Asher playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" by Stevie Ray Vaughn! This is really tough because it's so funky and takes a lot of complicated alternation between strumming and picking in the right picking hand. And you have to keep the funky beat! We spent a lot of time going bar by bar on this to get all of the rhythms and he practiced to the point where it all became second nature. Very proud!
Here is Jude performing "Adelita" at the Lamar Middle School end-of-year concert!
05/19/2022
Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the end-of-year Lamar Middle School classical guitar ensemble performance and got to see two of my students perform live for the first time! They both did great! I am so very proud of all of these kids and their progress!
I often say the toughest hurdle playing guitar is first learning how to play chords. You learn how to hold the guitar, where to put your hands, how to pick and how to press on the frets and all of which is fairly doable right off the bat. But playing chords involves pressing three or four of your fingers down at the same time and not covering up other strings and all of the sudden playing guitar becomes 10x harder! Then you have to switch everything lighting fast for the next chord! It can be slightly torturous.
So I would like to use this set up to proudly introduce Vincent who recently started lessons and who after devouring lots of single note melodies has recently progressed on to the first three main chords I teach - A, D and E. His chords sound beautiful and his timing with the metronome is killer! Check him out!
