The UGA Song Marathon

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting…

THE UGA SONG MARATHON!

The UGA Song Marathon is an event that we hold every year at the start of term 3, which is usually mid to late July.

Basically, regardless of how long you’ve been playing the guitar for, you and your tutor go back to the beginning of your UGA Student Book and play EVERY SONG YOU’VE EVER LEARNT!

Now that’s epic! Imagine students who have been playing for 2 or more years?! It would be kind of ridiculous to expect them to play every song the whole way through, so sometimes we simply play each section a few times to ensure that the student is still capable and hasn’t completely forgotten the song. Some students will only have a few pages of songs, so they should play every song in it’s entirety along with the music. The goal is to finish the marathon in no more than three weeks.

Why do we do the marathon?

Well, it’s great revision and a great test of your reading skills. Some students memorise songs, but you can’t memorise all of them – so learning how to read them is very important. It’s also great to go back, enjoy your old songs and reminisce about the memories associated with them. But my favourite reason is so that you can compare it’s difficulty now to when you first learnt it. Students are always saying “this song was sooo difficult when I first learnt it, but it’s so easy now. I can’t believe I ever found it hard!”.

I love hearing that.

The goal is to finish all of your songs within the first two weeks of the term and possibly the third week if need be. All students should be working on new content by week 4.