ping NoteBoat

It was Notebook... haha, sorry notebook, just took away a possible excuse for you ;)

****EDIT******* I just called you notebook....Twice...Haha, Change all Notebooks to noteboat... Please bear with us and our techinical difficulties while we smack taso in the head three times with a book, and then a boat.

I'd be interested in seeing the first year outline if you still have it.

ditto

Same here :D

Yeah, I did... and I can't find it in a search... I remember I had about 20 things on the list, but I don't work from a checklist with students, so I'll try to reconstruct. This isn't neccesarily in order, but I try to cover in year 1:

1. How to hold the guitar
2. How to tune
3. Basic open chords
4. Basic strumming patterns
5. The pentatonic scale
6. The 12-bar progression
7. Basic techniques: bends, slides, vibrato
8. Boogie patterns (stretches the fingers)
9. Beginning to improvise
10. Basic fingerstyle - helps with clean fingering
11. Sight reading in open position. We start with the key of C, of course, add accidentals, learn to do the B note with either 3rd string/4th fret or 2nd string open (good preparation for reading in higher positions - gets you used to the idea that one note is in more than one place); then the keys of G and F to get used to accidentals in the key signature
12. Basic barre chords on the E form
13. Major scale patterns
14. Triad chord inversions
15. Dominant 7ths as inversions (four positions of each chord)

hmmm.... I'm shy of the 20 or so. I must be getting old, or I'm combining concepts in this list.

Every student is different, and each one has different musical interests and tastes (and physical capabilities, and dedication to practice, etc.), but that's the core I try to go through. I keep a notebook for students - because I've always hated the 'what were we working on' statement at the start of every lesson I took from EVERY teacher I had... here's this month for a couple of students:

LP (female, late 40s, has a classical guitar, played some folk tunes 20 years ago, interested in celtic music): reviewed open chord fingerings,
worked through four fingering patterns, alternate bass notes in picking patterns, playing two fingers at a time with the picking hand, discussion of alternate tunings

TB (male, age 11, likes 'new country', 2 yrs of lessons with another teacher before me): single note fingering exercises, the role of dominant 7th chords, basic boogie patterns, improving speed in chord changes, the blues scale in open position, sight reading on the first two strings, keeping the same dynamics in upstrokes on single notes, learning two songs from CDs he likes

The real key is to try to incorporate those core techniques I've listed above with material the student wants to play... to try to keep things simple enough so they make noticeable progress in each lesson and want to come back for more... to challenge the mind, but not overwhelm (another thing I hated in my early lessons - 'here's five scale patterns to learn this week'), and to relate ideas to MUSIC, not just the exercise book.

Year 2...

1. Complicated strumming patterns (syncopated, walking bass lines, cross picking)
2. Any major scale fingerings we haven't covered yet
3. Improvising with major scales - some students get this in year 1, depending on their musical interests
4. Interpreting sheet music... creating a musical experience, not a robotic rendition (actually, this part really starts to be emphasized in year 2, but continues as long as they take lessons!)
5. Ensemble playing, both rhythm/lead (both parts) and lead/lead as in written duets
6. Reading through at least 2 accidentals (keys of D, Bb), preferably 3
7. Minor scale fingerings
8. Relating major and minor scales in all keys
9. The other types of 7th chords
10. The basic concepts of melody chords and voice leading

After that, the rest is all driven by interest.

On behalf of all the interested parties, thanks a bunch Tom.

Yeah, I did... and I can't find it in a search... I remember I had about 20 things on the list, but I don't work from a checklist with students, so I'll try to reconstruct. This isn't neccesarily in order, but I try to cover in year 1:

5. The pentatonic scale

Does this mean learn the scale in all keys, from all positions that the root of each key starts, all the way up the fretboard? Sorry for bumping this again, but I think a light may have actuallly went off in my head today thinking abuot this.

In the first year, I like to have all students learn the pentatonic scale in at least one position. If you're going to pursue lead guitar, it's a must to learn it in all positions - otherwise you won't be able to use the whole range of the guitar.

Since I generally teach the pentatonic scale before the major scale and key signatures, I don't stress knowing the notes of the pentatonic, although you should know what scale degrees the notes fall on (the minor pent is 1-b3-4-5-b7). As you learn the notes, the major scales, and the keys, the note names of the pentatonic seem to follow naturally.

One of the wonderful thigs about the guitar is the ability to transpose by simply changing positions. If you learn it in one key, and know where the roots are, you can play in any key. I usually teach the minor pentatonic in A, then after the student has been improvising for a bit we move to G - that gets the idea of moveability across.

Noteboat-

How do you practice the improvising with your students? Do you have them improvise infront of you? I only ask because I'm trying to teach a few of my friends, and it seems (I think this applied for me too) that starting off, when one isn't very good at it, it can be embarassing to do infront of others. Thanks :)

Everybody's nervous about improvising at first. You're trying to coordinate what you hear in your head (which may not be very 'good' to start), find those notes on the fingerboard (also pretty poor at that stage), and do it while you're under scrutiny. When I started to improvise, I asked the director of he college jazz band for advice, and he hooked me up with a bass player as an improvisation coach. In our first lesson, he restricted me to a single note (F, but in any octave) to improvise over a progression. That particular exercise bored the heck out of me, but it did teach me the importance of rhythm and silence in a solo... and the fact that a good solo does not need a lot of notes - some very striking solos have only about six notes in them.

So the challenges I see in teaching improvising myself are: how do you get the student at ease, how do you make it 'ok' to sound bad, and how do you 'teach' simplicity (and why is it that students who are doing sight reading and scales in eighth notes are suddenly compelled to solo in 32nds?) I'm still mulling over my approach, so what I do today might not be exactly what I do a year from now, but these are my current answers...

I make the first example I play a 'bad' one. They've already been hearing me play for a while at that point, so I don't think they'll say 'man, this guy sucks' and never come back - and when they start to try a minute or so later, what they do won't sound awful by comparison.

I keep the notes restricted, although not to just one note. We use one octave of the pentatonic to start, and extend the range in later lessons. Then I ask them to play something - anything - with that range, for the space of one measure.

I then talk about the importance of phrasing. I'll take the four or five note lick that they just played, and do it legato, then staccato, again bending up to the highest note and releasing it for the next note, bending up and 'choking' the note, and sliding into the first note. The important thing here is that I'm showing them how to improve what they just did. The goal is to take the mystery out of it... it's a process, not magic; you can take what you can do and make it sound better (too many people stumble around waiting for it to sound better without actually doing anything active to improve it) We try improvising again, using just 1-2 measure phrases over a single chord.

We then improvise while I play a progression. I talk about the importance of anticipating a chord change. I'll play the V7 in whatever key we're in, and ask them to hunt around until they find a good note to start that chord. Then I'll have them try to pay attention to the changes, and hit that note when the V7 appears. In later lessons we'll extend that target tone approach to other chords.

At some point in the first few lessons on the topic, I talk about the history of improvisation in popular music... how a soloist would alter a melody, and ideas would get traded back and forth in dixieland (I may put on a Hot Fives CD or something like that so they can hear it). We then try a familiar melody, like "When the Saints Go Marching In"... although last week I used Jingle Bells with one student :) , and play it with alterations. We work on changing ONE thing at a time - keep the melody and change the rhythm, or keep the rhythm and change the melody. I think that demonstrates relating a solo to the song that lies underneath it - something all great solos (and not enough guitar solos) do.

I'll also do call and response type drills. Improvising isn't about being in your own little world, it's about making your own little part fit into the bigger world... you need to listen to what other people are doing, and use it. Ear training is a regular part of music lessons, so this won't be anything strikingly new to my students.

Finally, I stress the use of jam tracks. You get good at improvising by making a lot of mistakes. Depending on the student, I'll either record a track, grab something off the internet, or recommend a commercial thing like an Aebersold CD.

Over time, we might spend some time listening to specific artists' solos - how is it that Santana sounds different from Harrison? What is it that King (any of them, BB, Freddy, Albert...) does that makes their blues different from Bloomfield? In the end, you want to make it sound like yourself, and that's a real challenge for anybody. Adults have mental barriers about expressing themselves in new media - music, art, poetry, whatever - because of their developed expectations. Kids don't have those barriers as deeply ingrained, but they are still working on figuring out who they are...

A few months ago I ran into a woman who had been one of my early students some 25 years ago. She told me that one of our lessons she never forgot (although I had!) - said I'd heard her play a line, and then told her to play it again like she was eating an ice cream cone. That instruction made it click for her - music is an emotionally expressive medium, and if you can connect an emotion, any emotion, to your expression, you have found the key.

The chops will catch up if you have something to say. If you have nothing to say (or don't even realize you can "say" something), chops don't help.

Wow, Noteboat...what a fantastic reply. Lots of good info here. I'm currently working on improving my soloing skills. I really like the idea of taking a short lick and playing it as many different ways as possible. I'll definately be adding this as an exercise in the practice routine!

Yeah thanks noteboat, exactly what I needed.