Guitar Teaching Tips and Tricks?
“There are many spokes to the centre of the wheel” which is just another way of saying that teaching people to play the guitar is ridden with variables and that no two teachers (or no two guitar students for that matter) are the same?
This section will contain a series of short (what I hope are) insights into the inner workings of the brain of a guitar teacher.
These tips and tricks are not designed to work for every guitar teacher in every situation. They are just things that (sometimes) work for me and might (sometimes) work for you?
Every guitar teacher is different. Every guitar student is different and therefore every lesson is bound to be at least slightly different.
There is another old proverb which states something along the lines of “you can never step into the same river twice” and even though at the beginning of a lesson we might make assumptions about the likely behaviours and capabilities of our students we need to be able to adapt in accordance with the actual circumstances rather than just throw the same bunch of “stock” lessons at all of our learners?
Some guitar students will pick up particular concepts and techniques remarkably quickly but might struggle with technical or theoretical areas that we might imagine that they would take in their stride?
Whilst you need to have a plan for your guitar lesson it is important to be able to adapt (or even abandon) it should the occasion demand or the opportunity present itself.
You may find that a student needs to go back over some old ground that you thought they were comfortable with or it could be that you discover that they are more competent with regard to theoretical knowledge or technical ability than you expected at the start of the session.
The list of potential variables that exist at the beginning of any guitar lesson means that it is almost inevitable that the experience that you deliver to your guitar student will not be quite the same as the one that you thought that you would be providing at the start of the session?
For me, the key to teaching guitar is to work out the answer to the question “what is the best thing you can do for this person’s guitar playing within the next hour”?
