I signed up for guitar lessons today.

[Chip McDonald]

Had my first lesson today. Not sure how I feel about it. At one point the instructor did say that he uses the first lessons to figure out how much the student already knows, but it was very unstructured.

 

That's normal. There is no way of knowing what to teach otherwise; and without context there can't be structure.

 

and he told me that he does not teach from a book.

 

That's good as well IMO.

 

I left having been shown alternate chord structures that are easy for switching chords quickly, but with no reference to refer to at a later time.

 

Short cut fingerings aren't a good thing IMO, particularly at first.

 

 

When I took piano lessons my instructor had won a scholarship at Julliard and was very structured. We used three books even as a beginner and I knew exactly what I was supposed to practice between lessons.

 

In an ideal world students would practice exactly what is assigned to them, but that basically never happens. I would wait and see what the guy does for the next few lessons; having a book or a "structure" with no context is a rip off IMO. If a Juilliard person teaches a private lesson, as if the student is somehow attending Juilliard, with the same mentality, it's not going to be effective. You can't provide structure with no context; going to Juilliard is a context, but not just taking lessons from someone who went there.

 

 

 

I'm not sure what I am supposed to practice this week other than the chord progressions he showed me, if I can remember them. Next week we do bass. I'll see if it goes any better.

 

Practicing drums is a different mentality than guitar. Drumming can be a very linear learning process up to a point. And it *requires* a fastidious approach to become "good". "Good" as a target on guitar is all over the place. As a teacher you've got to figure out what the student thinks is "good", or else they won't listen or do anything you say at all. And getting to "good" happens faster in the context of motivation. Exercises on guitar will not pay off like it does with drums.

 

 

You want a teacher that can teach unstructured. If they can't think on their feet, figure out what you want to do, what your motivation and skill level is - and then plop a book in front of you (unless they wrote the book - and you're fine with that) - that's a warning IMO.

[GovernorSilver]

Had my first lesson today. Not sure how I feel about it. At one point the instructor did say that he uses the first lessons to figure out how much the student already knows, but it was very unstructured. We started a bit late because as the only worker there he had to open the store, yet he kept looking at his phone to make sure we did not run over in time. Not sure why he was so concerned because there was no customers and no other students waiting for a lesson. I asked for a recommendation on a beginner book and he told me that he does not teach from a book. He finally mentioned a book on chords that he likes, Guitar Chord Bible by Phil Capone. I left having been shown alternate chord structures that are easy for switching chords quickly, but with no reference to refer to at a later time. When I took piano lessons my instructor had won a scholarship at Julliard and was very structured. We used three books even as a beginner and I knew exactly what I was supposed to practice between lessons. I'm not sure what I am supposed to practice this week other than the chord progressions he showed me, if I can remember them. Next week we do bass. I'll see if it goes any better.

 

I don't think the difference between your piano teacher and your guitar teacher has to do with the instrument. It's more about them, specifically, as individuals.

 

I've taken one-on-one lessons - so, not counting group classes or workshops - on viola, cello, guitar, and piano. Not a single one of those teachers taught out of one book.

 

The teachers who operate with Suzuki Method tend to use the Suzuki books of course. But even those teachers are not slaves to any book. Sometimes they decided to skip certain lessons in the Suzuki book. Sometimes they decided to skip entire books. My viola teacher had me skip from book 2 of Suzuki Method to book 5 - dunno why, exactly, but it was the call she made, based on how she perceived my progress, and whatever master plan she had for me in her head.

 

My first guitar lesson was with my roommate. He taught me the cowboy chords, and how to strum the chords for some songs. So I'll skip over to my 2nd guitar teacher... from what I recall of the first lesson, he showed a 3 note per string scale pattern and taught me how to pick with palm mothing. He also gave me an intro to chord construction - how to make triads or something.

[RABid]

Thanks Chip. That makes me feel better. I'll give it a few weeks and see how it goes. In the mean time I posted on the guitar forum asking for suggestions on songs to learn. It is funny you bought up drums. At the same time that I was taking piano lessons in high school I was also learning drums. That was a totally different experience. The band director showed me how to hold the drum sticks, and told me what notes represented which drums. That was it. I taught myself by playing along with records. No instruction at all, even from other high school drummers. To be honest, after 3 months I was the best drummer in high school. The really good musicians were all paying horns. I practiced drums a lot more than piano, and by senior year I auditioned for a spot at university on both piano and drums, and was accepted on both. Two very different paths of learning that lead to the same outcome.

[Anderton]

In an ideal world students would practice exactly what is assigned to them, but that basically never happens.

 

I gotta mention what made me stop taking guitar lessons. I was studying classical guitar, and dutifully following all the assignments for melodic playing. But I also wanted to learn chords, so I got a book that taught chord shapes and how chord notes fit together. I was 10 years old, and so proud of myself for having learned additional material.

 

I could hardly wait for my next lesson so I could show Mssr. Jacques Breguet what I had learned. I was sure he would think "okay, the dude's really into it, let's hit the accelerator!" Instead, he flew off the handle and became enraged that I dare explore other aspects of the guitar. We were already on thin ice because I was very left-handed at the time, but he said I had to learn how to play right-handed, so I did. (To this day, I can play really complex chords...really slowly, LOL).

 

I quit taking guitar lessons after that. "Mickey Baker's Complete Course in Jazz Guitar" book series became my Bible

[RABid]

My piano teacher had a great system. Practice the music that she assigned, and your reward was to get to learn a popular, current song of your choice. Looking back, she handled me very well. There was a song I was supposed to learn in C minor and I did not want to deal with the black keys so I played the entire song on only white keys. Instead of getting mad or criticizing me she turned it into a theory exercise and had me figure out and explain why the song sounded okay, just not the same, when I switched to white keys only. It was my first real lesson in music theory. The song was in C minor and I had unknowingly changed it to C Major. She even had me play it both ways and tell her which version felt happy and which felt sad.

[KuruPrionz]

Learn "chordal scales", you will always find them useful. Be aware that pop music will break away from what I am going write below and that's OK.

I'll bring that up later, then you will know about those kinds of structures.

 

The most important thing about guitar is that any pattern or shape you learn will apply up or down the fretboard on the same strings. Once you know a scale in one key, you can easily play it in all keys.

This is very different than keyboard, where each major or minor scale has it's own fingering for each key.

 

So, C major chordal scale (you will want to look up a diminished chord, just play it on the 1st through 4th strings. The 1st string is the one farthest from your nose, the 6th string is the one that is closest.

 

If I just write C, that is C major. Minors are min, diminished are dim.

 

C Dmin Emin F G Amin Bdim C

 

Learn that and then learn to play it in D E F G A B. Eventually you'll get how the guitar is laid out and it all falls into place.

[GovernorSilver]

In an ideal world students would practice exactly what is assigned to them, but that basically never happens.

 

I gotta mention what made me stop taking guitar lessons. I was studying classical guitar, and dutifully following all the assignments for melodic playing. But I also wanted to learn chords, so I got a book that taught chord shapes and how chord notes fit together. I was 10 years old, and so proud of myself for having learned additional material.

 

I could hardly wait for my next lesson so I could show Mssr. Jacques Breguet what I had learned. I was sure he would think "okay, the dude's really into it, let's hit the accelerator!" Instead, he flew off the handle and became enraged that I dare explore other aspects of the guitar. We were already on thin ice because I was very left-handed at the time, but he said I had to learn how to play right-handed, so I did. (To this day, I can play really complex chords...really slowly, LOL).

 

I quit taking guitar lessons after that. "Mickey Baker's Complete Course in Jazz Guitar" book series became my Bible

 

Sounds similar to what my classmate in engineering classes told me about his violin lessons. His teacher was teaching him classical stuff and was infuriated when she found out he had been playing with improvisation. She yelled at him about his technique being ruined and whatnot.

 

Years later I was taking lessons with my last viola teacher. She asked what I've been up to and I said I'd gone up to Baltimore for free improvisation jam sessions, without hesitation (or forethought). Without skipping a beat, her response was "Great! Discovering new sounds on your own is another fine way to learn your instrument!". We then proceeded with our lesson time - no big deal.

[GovernorSilver]

Thanks Chip. That makes me feel better. I'll give it a few weeks and see how it goes. In the mean time I posted on the guitar forum asking for suggestions on songs to learn

 

Take on whatever songs you want, my man.

 

Unless the song you want to learn happens to be "Fracture" by King Crimson or something. If that really is the case and if your teacher is any good - he won't just be dismissive, but he'll level with you on what the path to get there will look like, and the level of effort.

 

I once told one of my teachers "I wanna learn Giant Steps!". Teacher's response was, "Cool! Do you know all 7 7th chords of the major scale? Can you transpose them in thirds?". I was like "Uhh, there's 7 of them". Teacher was like "Well my friend we have some work to do..."

[Anderton]

Years later I was taking lessons with my last viola teacher. She asked what I've been up to and I said I'd gone up to Baltimore for free improvisation jam sessions, without hesitation (or forethought). Without skipping a beat, her response was "Great! Discovering new sounds on your own is another fine way to learn your instrument!". We then proceeded with our lesson time - no big deal.

 

Sounds like my kind of teacher

[Chip McDonald]

Thanks Chip. That makes me feel better. I'll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.

 

 

Well, I can't endorse the guy, but the reality is to be effective I've got to evaluate what you're capable of and what you know, and then figure out what you want to be able to do - because it's unbelievably all over the place. Then there is the wild card of figuring out *what you want to do but you don't know it yet*, the things that kinesthetically fun to play/rewarding, that will get you to "practice" more than you realize.

 

In the mean time I posted on the guitar forum asking for suggestions on songs to learn.

 

Depends. A lot of what I do is try to figure out what the student *actually* listens to (which is something of a mystery for about half of my students.... a lot of times people say things they think *I* want to hear...). Because you play drums, I'd take that into account, but not knowing more that's too general of a question.

 

Everyone's path is different. Optimizing it takes observation.

 

 

]That was a totally different experience. The band director showed me how to hold the drum sticks, and told me what notes represented which drums.

 

Drumming can be broken down into limb independence, rudiments, and practice designed around that. The beauty of drums is that you CAN progress in a perfectly linear fashion; it's very logical. For a certain mindset it will click and snowball.

 

The problem with guitar is that there are so many plateaus people hit, and the momentum gets easily broken. Back in the Old Days parents used to take their kids to the bank to open a savings account, to teach them about saving and earning interest. People have a finite amount of motivation in their "bank", learning drums can be like an old-days savings account that accrues interest, guitar is a checking account. People get wrecked in guitar lessons by teachers that expect the student to withdraw all of their "motivation money" at once. It's also why I was against Guitar Hero, it's like a Guitar Motivation credit card.

 

 

That was it. I taught myself by playing along with records. No instruction at all, even from other high school drummers. To be honest, after 3 months I was the best drummer in high school. T

 

I had a similar experience. I went from 11th grade being the Photography-Brainy Nerd Guy to 12th grade the Guy That Plays Van Halen with the Former Graduated Guys That Are Now Pro Musicians. The school band director came into homeroom the first day and pulled me out, asked me to audition for jazz band and suddenly I'm playing Duke Ellington.

 

I make my students play to the recordings. The most important thing that's totally lost today thanks to the devaluation of music. It's also video game mentality: "I just barely cleared that level, on to the next!".

[Chip McDonald]

 

I could hardly wait for my next lesson so I could show Mssr. Jacques Breguet what I had learned. I was sure he would think "okay, the dude's really into it, let's hit the accelerator!" Instead, he flew off the handle and became enraged that I dare explore other aspects of the guitar.

 

I would suspect he either was intimidated by true interest, or lost for not being able to navigate outside his experience. Being flexible and willing to work with an individual is key IMO, the Motivation Bank withdrawal should be respected. Whether it's the kid I've got right now that thinks "The Chicken" is a Jaco song and must learn that before anything else, or .... the dark times..... back when I had to figure out how to teach 10 year old girls how to play parts of songs from the "Frozen" sound track.

 

Let me tell you, I have Bonus Points accrued from this one little girl, who I managed to get to play the melody to one of those songs on one string, tell me the names of the notes, keep her first finger down, coordinate alternate picking... she and her mother would sing along to it...

 

"Ok Lauren, do you want to do another song now?"

 

"YEAH!"

 

"Ok, is there something you've been listening to lately that you like?"

 

She rattles off the name of ANOTHER song from the Frozen sound track. Wonderful. She does that song, repeat: "what song would you like to do now?" - the NEXT song on the soundtrack. That went on for about 6-7 songs, months. From the Disney Frozen sound track. BUT - I managed to get her to start doing diads along with the melody, and to tell me whether it was a major third or a minor third, and to count offbeat accents.

 

But man, that was brutal. My wife had knee replacement surgery at Emory Christmas week that year; during her procedure I went down to the cafeteria to get something to eat, and.... the hospital staff was having their Christmas party, and lo and behold, what was the theme of their Christmas party?

 

FROZEN.

 

Complete with people dressed up as characters from the movie. I had to hear Frozen Karaoke for an hour while I fed myself. But then, that's not the best part......

 

Seeing that knee replacement surgery is now "day surgery" (???) while the nurse pulls my wife out to the curb so I could go get my car and pick her up, my wife is in a wheelchair in the lobby, zonked out .... along with a woman dressed as princess Whatever from Frozen. My wife is still half anesthetized, and says "wow, I'm so drugged up, she looks EXACTLY LIKE A PRINCESS, it even looks like she has a tiara!".

 

....................................................................

 

Your teacher could have been raging against a pre-conceived idea of what he expected you to eventually be. "He's capable, if he does this and this exactly like this he'll be a star!". Well, maybe, if it was 1892. But more than likely an inferiority complex I would think: "how dare someone think to do something I didn't outline first?". I face that a lot these days:

 

"I tried practicing what you showed me, but I'm not sure I was getting anywhere with it. So I watched a video on it".

 

"Ok, let me hear you play it..."

 

"Well, I still can't play it... I didn't have a lot of time to practice this week"

 

"........."

[KuruPrionz]

I agree with Chip that knowing what the student needs is a complex subject, what they think they need or want may be completely different than observation indicates.

 

I don't give lessons as a profession. I do show friends things I think will be useful to them that they may not realize are missing.

 

My current "student" is learning more ways of expressing her playing with new right hand techniques. She tends to take a fairly thin pick and strum away steadily, hitting all the strings.

I've been showing her different ways to mute the strings and the expression those provide. You can do a full mute with the right hand, a partial mute with the right hand, you can mute and quickly lift off to let the strings ring and you can mute with your left hand. She is making good progress and enjoys working on muting.

 

I am also showing her that while the guitar can be a set of 6 strings, it can also be 2 sets of 3 strings (and/or 4 sets of 3 strings), 3 sets of 2 strings (and or 5 sets of 2 strings) and that just playing single strings here and there can provide accents that are more expressive and bring the song to life.

 

That's plenty for now, I'll help her with her left hand after she gets comfortable with the right hand things I've shown her.

[Anderton]

 

FROZEN.

 

Ah, young grasshopper, what was the universe trying to tell you?

 

Maybe it was telling you to have a frozen margarita after every lesson with her.

[Chip McDonald]

That, or "this will make you wish for a return of the Taylor Swift Years!".

[GovernorSilver]

Years later I was taking lessons with my last viola teacher. She asked what I've been up to and I said I'd gone up to Baltimore for free improvisation jam sessions, without hesitation (or forethought). Without skipping a beat, her response was "Great! Discovering new sounds on your own is another fine way to learn your instrument!". We then proceeded with our lesson time - no big deal.

 

Sounds like my kind of teacher

 

Definitely my kind! She was generous, but also seemed to be the "throw 'em in the pool, they'll learn to swim eventually!" type.

 

After our first lesson together, she invited me to join the orchestra that she plays in - it was at a church. I was shocked. I stammered something about not being a member of that particular church and not feeling ready. She was my 2nd viola teacher, not my first, so I wasn't a totally raw beginner, but I was still painfully slow at reading music, my bowing and intonation sounded terrible, etc. She just smiled and said "I'm not a member of that church either, so don't worry about that... It'll be great training for you! The viola is the rhythm guitar of the string section - it'll be easy! Just play along as best as you can, and if you really struggle, just play the first note of each measure." My ego took a beating every month for the first several years playing in that orchestra. Half of the music was as easy as she promised. But some of it was J.S Bach...

 

She's the teacher that had me skip from Suzuki book 2 straight to book 5 to take on the viola arrangement of Cello Suite #1 Prelude by Bach. She also had me play duet arrangements with her of Bach. She never berated me for not being able to keep up with her. She'd just calmly assess what was going on with me, then assign me etudes out of a Wohlfartht book or something to fix my various technical issues. I asked here for info on the book so I could buy it - she said "No, you keep the book. I'm letting you have it.". She ended up giving, not selling - giving - me a fair number of music books.

 

One of the last thing we did together, before she passed away, was start working out of a blues fiddling book. She was going to start teaching me Irish fiddling too, as that was another of her skills, but never made it.

 

I miss her and am grateful to have studied with her.

[Joe Muscara]

Wow - she sounds like she was great. I think one of the important lessons in music generally is that in many cases, you can get by, and you won't die. If you pay attention and work at it, you will get better. I played with a big band for a few weeks in 2019 and I saw much improvement in that little time. I was in way over my head but I made a lot of progress because I made the effort.

[RABid]

Well, I dropped lessons today. The price was good, the location was handy, and I was excited. But in a 30 minute lesson I would get 10 minutes of instruction, watch the teacher show off on the instrument for 10 minutes, and sit around 10 minutes while he answered the store phone or helped customers. During that time he would check his watch at least 3 times to make sure he did not go a minute over, no matter how much time I lost while he was dealing with customers. The whole ordeal was an example of how not to give lessons or run a business. It may have been a mistake to schedule myself in the morning. The store owner/manager was never there so the person giving lessons was the only one in the store and thus had to answer the phone and wait on customers. Guess I am back to pre-recorded online lessons.

[GovernorSilver]

Shame about that.

 

I had several teaches who ended up spending more time with me than what I paid for - if the lesson was supposed to be one hour, we'd end up spending an extra 30-60 min. together, especially if the teacher didn't have another student booked right after me, and of course if the teacher got enthusiastic about something.

[Anderton]

Well, I dropped lessons today. The price was good, the location was handy, and I was excited. But in a 30 minute lesson I would get 10 minutes of instruction, watch the teacher show off on the instrument for 10 minutes, and sit around 10 minutes while he answered the store phone or helped customers. During that time he would check his watch at least 3 times to make sure he did not go a minute over, no matter how much time I lost while he was dealing with customers. The whole ordeal was an example of how not to give lessons or run a business. It may have been a mistake to schedule myself in the morning. The store owner/manager was never there so the person giving lessons was the only one in the store and thus had to answer the phone and wait on customers. Guess I am back to pre-recorded online lessons.

 

Based on your other option, it sounds like you're better off with the online lessons