What Do We Teach Our Students
“What do we teach our students?”… Now there’s a massive question.
The way I see it, it’s our job to ensure that our students are learning and improving in their guitar and music interests – whatever they may be.
Typically, there are two approaches for our students;
1. Special Area Of Interest
There are some students (usually those with some playing experience) who want to develop a specific area of interest. This could be fingerpicking, chords, soloing, improvising, shredding, theory, songwriting, speed picking… absolutely anything. In these instances, we usually recommend Private Guitar Lessons so that we can focus on what you want to learn. These kinds of students will learn exactly what their interested in, which usually involves using songs to teach a range of techniques and skills like fingerpicking, picking, bar chords and much more.
2. Learn Everything
Some students just want to have fun, be an awesome guitarist or simply don’t know what to learn. We recommend learning EVERYTHING. Now, that’s a huge task. So how do we go about teaching someone everything there is in guitar? We use The Ultimate Guitar Method, which is a course that breaks down all areas into the 5 Fundamental Techniques; Chords, Picking, Aural, Reading and Songs.
Here’s a short list (yes, this is the short version) of what students learn in Ultimate Guitar Method:
- Songs
- Open Chords
- Bar Chords
- Power Chords
- Scales
- Picking Exercises
- Melodies
- Riffs
- Timing
- Rhythm Skills
- The Music Alphabet
- Chord Composition
- Circle Of Fifths
- Music Notation
- Sight Reading
- Keys
- Movable Scale Shapes
- Major Modes
- Minor Modes
- Chord Extensions
- Chord Alterations
- Rock, Pop, Jazz, Blues, Metal and Country songs
- Sweeping
- Apreggios
- Tapping
- Two Hand Tapping
- Percussive Fingerstlye
- Thumb-picking
- Aural
- Song Composition
- Song Structure
- Music Effects
- Post Production Effects
- Recording Techniques
- Legato
- Alternate Picking
- Vibrato
- Trill
- Tremolo
- Parts of the guitar
- How to develop your own sound
- How to tune a guitar
- How bars and beats work
Additionally, we focus on teaching real music. To give you an idea of what this means, here’s a playlist of just some of the songs that we teach in Step A of The Ultimate Guitar Method. This is the first grade of the course and we frequently use it to teach students aged between 3 and 13.
Ok, I’m sure that’s enough (at least for the time being). The bottom line is – we teach EVERYTHING. We are not singers who play guitar on the side. We are not a guitar store that decided a guitar tuition school is a great way to make more money. We are serious guitarists who are serious about teaching and have developed effective methods into a craft.
Responses