Playing the guitar is a beautiful thing

Playing the guitar is beautiful but there are some people who teach it can make it boring or worse, a misery; that does take some doing.

I was contacted by an ex pupil of mine that had just received his music degree but in his words ‘Uni was good apart from my guitar lessons sadly. The man who “taught me” showed me how much a teacher can really affect your enjoyment of music! So If I didn’t seam grateful at the time... thank you! Because it probably got me through my performance module alone!’

I have always been aware of the teachers who have the unique gift of making the guitar boring I think a lot of reasons for this is the assumption that the guitar should be taught something like a classical instrument. No offense if you are learning classical guitar that is a different matter altogether but not if you are learning a contemporary form of guitar playing.

I see this type of thinking a lot among teachers that there is a correct way to do something and this may be the case if you’re learning a strict discipline of playing for a particular instrument but as soon as you get outside the confines and strictures of a way of thinking then there cannot be an ordained way of playing.

Remember that all of the great contemporary players had some form of idiosyncratic way of delivering music from a Hendrix playing with his teeth approach to the Jeff Healey ‘play the guitar on your lap’ or a Keith Richards ‘playing the different tuning’ to Eric Clapton ‘play so loud that your amp is about to blow up’ sort of thing. None of these follow the correct way of playing guitar with the thumb at the back of the neck and the hand correctly placed over the guitar strings.

So what is it that we need to do? I would suggest that a good teacher is an alchemist, one who finds which ingredients are available within the pupil and by mixing these with the ingredients that the teacher has, can create something transformational there is really no way that you can know what the pupil is capable of and a best guess it is something that is completely beyond what you believe is possible. That has often been my experience but it is only my experience if I allow them to push my ideas beyond my comfort zone.

Education sadly has become very little about opening the mind and very much about social management and ticking boxes, people asking questions about tempo and about technicality when in actual fact these things are taken in the stride of the pupil if they are excited about the prospect of discovering how brilliant they are about being creative.

Because education and higher education in particular is all about the dollar it has become an economic machine that needs to be fed creating much in its likeness; very different from opening the mind like a parachute to explore the creative landscape from a distance but still infused with the excitement of the jump.

So think about what makes music exciting for you, ditch all the stuff that you found boring and go for that. Technical material that is required in order to make stuff exciting should be put over in such a way that people are desperate to learn it.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk