Boyd Holmes, the Writer

Stacking Skills for Success: the Guitar - Part Three - Odds and Ends

10/19/2022

ODDS and ENDS

(I know some of this techno-talk might appear daunting – if you have any questions, email me)

Best for class guitar: classical or steel string?
Steel string

Best make and model for class guitar:
Rogue RA-090 full-size dreadnaught

Chairs or sit on floor?
Chairs

What kind of picks?:
What? You don’t have your own personalized picks? LOL – Dunlop Tortex .50mm

Strings:
Round wound phosphorous bronze for the wrapped strings, stainless steel for the top two

String brand:
Generic round wound bulk strings at juststrings.com – you’ll save money, buy in bulk, and never be looking for a G or a B string when they inevitably break.

String sizes:
55, 45, 35, 24, 15, 12 – plus or minus 1

Must-have music room guitar accessories:
Tubular guitar stands, string winder/peg puller, small screwdriver set, guitar polish, tuning app

Must-have gigging guitar accessories:
Peterson StroboClip tuner, Dunlop StrapLocks, fishbowl tip jar, business cards, 9v batteries

Best beginning guitar method:
My own

Best guitar for the instructor:
Anything acoustic/electric and built like a tank with a loud bottom end – take some Ibanez dreadnaughts out for a test drive. Cost between $300-400

Best guitar amp for the instructor:
Something sturdy, two channel with an XLR input for a Shure SM58. Check out some Peavys. If a kid throws up on it, you won’t cry.

Best acoustic guitar for gigging:
A MIM Martin DX – If a drunk breaks it, it’s not like you broke a REAL Martin. If it needs a pickup, have a Fishman Aura Pro installed.

Best electric guitar for gigging:
Tie –
__A chambered Godin Multiac for more rock/pop tones as well as guitar synthesis, w/round wound strings
__An Ibanez archtop for more jazz sounds, w/flat wound strings
If a drunk throws up on either of these, you WILL cry.

Best guitar synthesizer:
__Analogue - BOSS SY-300
__Digital – Roland GR-55

Best electric guitar amp for gigging:
__Small to medium size venue- Fishman Loudmouth Performer
__Large venue: Fender Tone Master Deluxe Twin Reverb

Best vocal mic:
Shure SM58

Best guitar pedal for gigging:
Tech21 RK5 V2 – includes delay with tap tempo, boost, OMG overdrive, independent reverb with choice of room size, a rotary speaker mode, compression, fuzz, a tuner, headphone capability, and an XLR Output

Best vocal pedal for gigging:
TC Helicon VoiceTone Create Vocal pedal – Gives you the ability to add a second or third vocal harmony voice with effects. Caveat emptor: it only sounds cool if you sing in tune. If you’re out, the other two parts will also be out. Not for the faint of heart. Fairly steep learning curve.

Best unpowered 12 channel mixer for gigging:
Yamaha MG12XUK 12-Channel Analog Mixer

Most painful classroom truth:
Every year, you’ll lose one or two classroom guitars to wear and tear.

Favorite phone call:
The parent asking where they can buy an affordable guitar for their child.

Next stop: Stacking Skills for Success: Guitar - Part Four

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Stacking Skills for Success: the Guitar - Part Two

10/18/2022

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As you can tell from “Stacking Skills for Success: Guitar - Part One”, I’ve always got guitar in the back of my mind when I'm teaching.

I'm also not reluctant to spend 800 words describing ten minutes of a music class – if it’s a crucial ten minutes.

The more I taught and performed outside of school, the more I believed in the 80/20 rule where 80% of your effort and time goes into preparing 20% of what you do and 20% of your effort and time goes to prepare the remaining 80%.

I know that guitar will be the culminating activity in my general music room just about every year for all the kids.

I wanted the way I introduced it to have a life-long arc, to have the guitar be an instrument they might put down but, because of their positive initial experience, to feel comfortable picking it up again down the road.

Just as swimming can be a life-long athletic activity, I wanted to have playing the guitar to have the same musical value in their lives.

Students will have to progress through there rhythm and pitch work, xylophones, and piano before they get to play guitar.

Piano is a major hurdle for some kids given all the fine motor skills and note reading required – but guitar is a powerful incentive.

When we get to guitar, I focus on rhythm playing, not single note melodies.

Kids want to strum, not play the melody to “Hot Cross Buns” that they performed on xylophone or piano.

I encourage playing single notes and generalizing our piano adage “five fingers for five notes” with “four fingers for four frets”.

But the bulk of our time is spent nailing down hitting a groove as automatically as they breath.

My concept of guitar is divided by your two hands.

The hand that does the fretting is the hand that represents your intellect, your ability to remember fingering patterns, and proper finger pressure on the strings.

The hand that is positioned over the tone hole represents your internal groove, your feelings.

The way I explained it to the kids was that they're fretting hand was their head and their strumming hand was their heart.

I would often ask, “Which is more important – head or heart?”

While young students might not be able to grasp the ideas of all the different chords and melodic configurations their fretting fingers can take, they will immediately be able and eager to translate their emotions into strumming.

Thank goodness I had a room of kids and not a room of adults.

It’s amazing how differently kids and adults approach strumming.

The more I taught adults the more I understood that childhood is a precious time where so much is done with so little thinking (AKA baggage) behind it.

Kids just do things, they don't worry about how or what they are doing will be perceived.

Adults, on the other hand, seem to lose that magical ability to instantly get in touch with their heart through an instrument as they get older.

It takes adults more work to play.

Adults become too analytic, too worried that they're going to make a mistake or look silly attempting something that they might not be able to achieve.

In short, thinking gets in the way as we get older.

But I’m concentrating on class guitar for children right now.

I was more focused on the heart than the head.

I started with an open D tuning, running D, A, D, F sharp, A, D, from low to high. I wanted their strumming to be so second nature and automatic that when I introduced fretting strings, they would not have to allocate any cerebral energy to their strumming hand.

When I did teach to the “head” during these first sessions, it was how to safely pick up and put down a guitar, what not to touch (namely the tuning keys), and how to hold a pick.

Another biggie for kids was fighting their proactive urge to extract a pick that has errantly gone in their guitar’s tone hoe. The rule was to raise their hand and I would give them another pick.

We had pilots and co-pilots: one guitar for two kids. One kid played while the other assisted.

We switched every sixty or seventy seconds. That kept everyone on their toes.

It was all about “down up” – performing one good strum cycle starting with a down stroke and immediately followed by an up stroke.

The electrifying sound of fifteen steel string guitars all strumming an open D major chord instantly give the class confidence, especially as I beamed ear to ear and bellow, “I told you could do it!”

Once they could do a “down up” we moved to a “double down up”: down up, down up.

While we are playing “down up down up”, we are starting to hear “weak, strong, weak, strong”.

If you guessed that a “triple down up” was next, you are correct.

That would be followed by the “Buzz Lightyear down up”: “To infinity and beyond!”, where they start strumming for infinity as I cruise through the room to give up close and personalized feedback.

As soon as we did a ton of Buzz Lightyears, we started singing while playing – all of our music room folk songs played over the kids’ tonic drone D chord while I played the real changes on my amplified acoustic with all the chord changes.

There was lots of repetition, exchanging guitars, and even more repetition.

Their strumming hand was doing all the work and their fretting hand was simply steadying the neck just under the headstock.

With kindergarten children, it was much more informal: they would simply lay the guitar on the carpet and strum it and feel the different vibrations in the different places on the strings and wood.

More on guitar in “Stacking Skills for Success: the Guitar - Part Three”.

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Stacking Skills for Success: Guitar – Part One

10/17/2022

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So here we are at the top of the success pyramid.

We finally reached the guitar.

Some of you may be wondering why is the guitar at the top of the pyramid.

I like to say that motivation is always the hardest nut to crack.

Why do we do what we do?

As for me and guitar, there’s a pretty simple answer.

And it all originates in the first class, the first time I meet the kids.

In other posts, I reference the idea of “The Golden Hour”, the importance of that first class of the year.

What I neglected to mention is that there is a “Platinum Hour”. That’s the first class when I meet a new student.

Every student was once a new student.

Every first class of the year is a Golden Hour for some kids and a Platinum Hour for others.

While my first order of business is to establish order in our classroom, the second is to “make the sale” between the young student and music.

Not between the class and music but each individual student.

It’s not about me.

It’s about music.

I can choose any instrument to play that first class.

I always pick the guitar – because I know it will “close the sale”.

The first fifteen minutes of that golden or platinum class are pretty dry.

I never smile or frown during those first fifteen minutes.

Wearing a three-piece black suit and using a mic to make my points, I lay out the rules and teach them what Stop/Go time means.

Along the way, I give them a few breaks or Go times.

But then it's time for the initial shared musical moment, the first song, “The Hello Song”.

From that point on, it's a whole different room.

Within ten minutes I will have taken my dreadnaught guitar out of its case, thrown it in the air and caught it over my head to looks of bewilderment, tuned the six strings without use of a guitar tuner, and start teaching them “The Hello Song”.

As I start to play, it's basically 80BPM but gradually speeds up.

There are a lot of scripted jokes and visual sight gags thrown in that easily make them laugh.

They start to realize that I’ve started smiling and having fun.

By the end of that song, the pedal’s to the metal and the smiles are ear-to-ear. We are cruising at 138BPM.

They're singing along with me as full-throated as they've ever sung before in school.

By the last note of the first time I do that “Hello Song”, I'm usually standing on top of a table, feet wide apart, strumming for all I'm worth, and singing directly to them, making eye contact with each kid, urging them to keep dancing and singing with me, smiling, throwing out guitar picks, not looking at my fingers, pulling the kids into the moment.

After the experience of that song, nothing is the same with music for those new kids as it was when they walked in.

I remember once hearing a fifth grader whisper to a friend after that first song, “This never gets old!”

After that song, nine out of every ten kids wants to play guitar.

I mean they REALLY want to play guitar.

That tenth kid, that's the kid who doesn’t just see themselves as playing guitar. They see themselves as me playing guitar.

From that day on, kids know that they are going to learn the guitar and play just like me.

I tell them I'm not lying, that I'm not making this up, that if they really want to be as good as me or even better, they're on the road to being that musician, that singer, that guitar player.

However, there are a few steps we have to take along the way, there are a few things we have to learn and master in music.

Down the road, no matter how hard some activities are in music class, I can always point to that guitar and ask “is the juice worth the squeeze? If you want to play that guitar someday, you're going to do the work THIS day.”

And it never failed.

I performed that “Hello Song” for the “first time” hundreds of times.

In total, I performed it over 25,000 times in my teaching career.

I threw my guitar in the air and caught it just as many times.

My goal was to always make every performance of “The Hello Song” as electric as the first time the kids heard it.

That song would always serve as our connective tissue.

Just as Jerry Seinfeld recounts how he rehearsed and edited the same seven minutes of comedy material three times a night, seven days a week, for months before he allowed himself to perform those same seven minutes on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, that was the way I looked at that “Hello Song”.

Every time I performed it, I was continually evaluating, modifying, taking data, and editing.

Clinically tightening things up, to accentuate the funny moments, to cut the moments that didn’t work, identify the moments where I glance to my side, where I raise my eyebrows, where I lay a big joke on them and they all start to laugh.

I perfected just the right moment when I needed to jump on the table.

By the way, the jumping on the table routine was started decades ago when I was in our wedding band “Lassman & Holmes”.

At some point during the wedding reception when everyone was on the dance floor, I would jump off the stage and cruise through the crowded dance floor as I played and sang.

My bass and vocal mic were wireless. Eventually, I would end up on the other side of the ballroom by the head table.

The guests, bridesmaids, ushers, groom, and bride were all on the dance floor so the table was empty which allowed a three-piece tuxedoed me to hop up on the table, do a bit of “Kevin Bacon/Footloose”, spread my feet, and do the rock and roll thing.

It worked in the classroom just as it did in the reception: sure, it was more “Robert Preston/Music Man” than “Kevin Bacon/Footloose” but the effect was the same: all eyes were on me for a few seconds and the sale was in process.

What the kids realized when they did that first song with me was that music brings us to life, music makes us smile, music makes us want to get up and move around, and music makes us want to make music.

After that opening song, we would quickly switch into “go time”, which was a break.

The breathless kids would be laughing and talking with each other about what just happened.

I'd stroll around and ask “Hey, do you like this guitar? Want to try it on?”

As a crowd developed, I would slip the strap of my guitar over a kid's shoulder, and say “If I didn't know this guitar was made for me, I'd say it sure looks like it was made for you! But see those boxes? Those are the guitars you’re going to play – they’re right up there waiting for you!”

And I would point to my non-descript stockpile of sixteen boxed guitars high on top of a bookcase.

Once the kids looked at my guitar up close and saw those boxes, they knew the day was coming where they would be playing guitar, too.

That's a kind of motivation and excitement that is beyond my pay grade.

It was the guitar.

As I would occasionally say to the kids in a mock self-deprecating basso profondo voice, “Behold the power and majesty of the guitar!” as I held it by the headstock like Thor’s hammer over my head.

And behold it they did.

I didn’t just “close the sale” of music.

It was “signed, sealed, and delivered”.

All because of the guitar.

More in “Stacking Skills for Success”: the Guitar - Part Two”.

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Limits

10/16/2022

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Encounters

10/16/2022

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Stacking Skills for Success: Piano - Part 4: Odds and Ends

10/16/2022

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BITS and PIECES

Best music room piano for the teacher:
Any of the upper end Casio Privias. Don’t go cheaper than $700.00. Look for wooden-weighted keys.

It will take a beating and continue to work. The samples are amazing. You’ll never have to get it tuned.

Don’t overwork the internal speakers; use an amp or run it through a classroom PA. Buy a case.

Yeah, with heavy daily usage, the keyboard will breakdown in about eight years but by then, you’ll be in a different school, right?

Best sustain pedal for teacher's digital piano:
M-Audio SP 2 - universal sustain pedal with piano style action for midi keyboards, digital pianos & more. Built like a tank. And when they fail, it is usually because of a screw that that has come undone inside the housing - a five minute easy fix.

Worst music room piano for the music teacher:
Any acoustic spinet or upright. Both create terrible sight-lines as well as too great a chasm between you and the class.

It will be out of tune 99% of every day of teaching.

Added detriment: your kids will learn to sing out of tune.

Best gigging piano:
Korg SV-2: Get the 88-key model WITHOUT speakers. Buy a keyboard amp. The best piano out there, bang for the buck. Tons of pre-sets. Killer Italian grand sound as well as classic Fender Rhodes and Wurlies.

No, it’s not too heavy. Maybe you are too weak?

Best keyboard stand for the teacher’s music room piano or the gigging piano:
A double X-brace. You’ll need stability; don’t go with a single; get a double.

Best overall piano books/series:
Alfred

Best source for budget a classroom keyboard lab:
Ebay and Amazon. Do your homework. Look for bargains and wait for sales.

Get 61-key electric keyboards with MIDI. Extra points if it has USB. I had a lot of different Yamaha models; they held up very well.

Buy the keyboards first, then the single X-brace keyboard stands. You can put the keyboards on the floor for a while until you get the stands. Don’t use chairs; have the kids stand. And you don’t need sustain pedals. If you have them, don’t connect them for several months.

Don’t loan them out.

Don’t buy cases. Keep the packing boxes for storage in the summer months.

Depending on how many keyboards you use, you’ll need extension cords and several 6-outlet, 200 joule, surge protector power strips.

You’ll probably want a 6-inch power extension cable for each keyboard power wart. It will allow you to use all of the inputs on the power strips. The reason: a single wall-wart tends to take up the space for two inputs on power strips.

Hardest truth to accept:
Every year several keyboards will break from wear and tear.

Does anything last with kids?

Two big reasons for electric keyboards:
MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) and USB (universal series bus): That’s how all electric keyboards (even the cheap ones) connect to computers, audio interfaces, DAWs (digital audio workstations) and soft synths (software synthesizers that are only computer code and don’t come with any hardware) like Pro Tool, Logic, and Reason. They don’t “roll tape” to record music these days. Recording is digital and electric keyboards are the primary way of inputting digital audio data.

I grew up writing music with a pencil and paper and still do.
On the other hand, I can do the “computer thing” and do it often– using DAWs as well as music notation software like Avid’s “Sibelius”.

Tip: kids are using this stuff at home. MIDI and USB are the recent past, now, and future: it’s about time all music teachers embrace them, read the f***king manual, and get on board before the next musical interface comes along and replaces MIDI.

Best gateway instrument for piano:
A chromatic xylophone

Biggest line of BS from music teachers getting fourth graders ready for band:
“Everyone wants to play drums!” No kidding, Captain Obvious, especially if you have been emphasizing drums, tambourines, shakers, maracas, castanets, sticks, wrist bells, bongos, triangles, egg shakers, jingle sticks, and Boomwackers for the past four years in your music room and don’t have a keyboard lab.

You reap what you sow.

What every music teacher dreads hearing when introducing band instruments to fourth graders:
Fourth grader (thinking about their keyboard or guitar at home): “No thanks, I’m good.”

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Good morning, DMEA!

10/14/2022

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Life

10/13/2022

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Stacking Skills for Success: Piano – Part Three

10/13/2022

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There's a reason why piano earned it's appellation as “king of the instruments”.

Piano is one of the few instruments that can provide melody, harmony, polyphony, and rhythm with a multi-octave range.

Next to familiarizing students to the core principles of my pyramid, namely, engaged listening, self-discipline, and a proactive mindset, introducing piano to entire schools, like Castle Hills Elementary School’s 600 students, New Castle Elementary School’s 700 students, or Wilbur Elementary School’s 1,200 students, was one of the greatest joys and accomplishments of my teaching career.

Teaching piano to one child is much different than teaching to twenty-five students.

Kids who parents have signed them up for piano lessons usually have some background with the instrument.

When I was working in Title 1 schools, many of the children had never touched a piano before I introduced my music room piano lab.

Much of what I was doing in my music room piano curriculum was playing developmental catch-up, especially with students’ fine motor abilities.

Every kid deserves the opportunity to play piano, starting with what all little kids first love to do – “climb the mountain”.

We started with “climbing the mountain”; starting at the bass side and sequentially playing each black key – no skipping allowed! - all the way to the “top of the mountain” and then back down the mountain.

We would climb it again with the white keys and eventually chromatically with all the white and black keys in order.

Want to use only your index finger the first few times you do it?

No problem!

Eventually I would demonstrate what using the index and ring finger looked like. And then introduce the thumb.

Eventually we got to five fingers for five keys.

I would invite the kids all around the electric piano so they could see my hands and fingers up close. Modeling at this stage was so important.

“If you can make your hands look and move like mine, you have a great shot at sounding like me, too!”

Our chromatic xylophones usually had a range of a tenth, with the low note being a C.

I put a round red sticker on all of the low Cs and a yellow sticker on the high Cs.

Correspondingly, I put similar stickers on all of our keyboards: blue on C3, red on C4, yellow on C5, and blue on C6.

This facilitated easily and quickly switching back and forth from xylophone and piano.

When two children shared a piano, it was easy to say, “The pilot uses the blue and red; the co-pilot uses yellow and blue”.

They would immediately be ready to play in matched hand position.

While I transferred and generalized music and concepts between the xylophone and piano at the outset, I didn't waste any time focusing on the polyphonic aspect of the piano, the ability to play multiple notes at the same time.

There are some general music teachers, primarily band and orchestra players, that, when given the opportunity to work with a piano lab and a class of kids, dwell for inordinate amounts of time on playing single line melodies.

While playing single-note lines is a desirable skill, one not to be scoffed at, it doesn’t take advantage of the core strength and ability of the piano – the ability to play many notes at the same time.

Vocalists especially need the ability to play a melody occasionally to check themselves with pitches. I'm often disheartened when a vocalist needs me to play a melody on the piano that they need to sing.

Every singer needs to be able to be able to plunk out melodies, maybe not performance worthy lines of music, but accurate pitches to help them learn lit.

In elementary school, with the limited time that we had, much of our initial effort was spent nailing down those simple five note diatonic melodies, from C4 to G4, D4 to A4, and all the corresponding variations.

But we quickly moved into polyphony, namely, intervals.

While we always used five fingers over five keys on both hands, I would introduce intervals in a visual way.

Let me give you an example.

“Let’s play a song like “Hot Cross Buns” just with your right index finger.

I know, I know! We're're breaking our 'five fingers on five keys" rule but just work with me!

Now use your right hand index finger and your middle finger to make the shape of the letter “V”.

Make sure you have a big space in between the tips of your two fingers as you form the V. That way there will be a piano key that doesn’t get pushed in between your index and ring finger.

Now, when you play the first note of “Hot Cross Buns” with your index finger, the left side of the V, your right side of the V, your middle finger, will skip over the note F and play G. Don't those two notes make a pretty sound?

Now keeping your fingers wide apart, let your index finger play the melody to “Hot Cross Buns” and allow your ring finger to travel along with it, always keeping that open space in between the two sides of the V.”

I used another visual for teaching chords and, you guessed it - I used the letter “W”.

After all, if I've already taught the letter V, why not generalize that to the letter W?

As far as assigning fingers to chord tones on the piano, I wasn't that picky at first.

I let kids experiment playing C, E, and G simultaneously with three fingers on either hand.

We took advantage of a “theme with variation” paradigm on piano.

That basic C chord was our theme.

We had tons of variations on it: playing it with the right hand, with the left hand, with both hands at the same time, alternating back and forth, creating a three four rhythm, left-right-right, left-right-right, starting at the lowest end of the keyboard and playing the C chord toward the top, starting at the top of the mountain and playing the C chord going down, arpeggiating it going up or going down with either hand or both simultaneously.

And all the while, we would be our repertoire of singing folk songs to our C drone chord.

In many ways, I wanted kids to have the ability to play melodies and to branch out into beginning piano books as they got older but I also wanted them to be able to harp movable chords on the keyboard within several weeks.

Harping is generally a guitar concept transfer to the piano.

Just as guitarist primarily play harmonies, chords, and rhythm, the same can be done on piano to accompany a vocal or instrumental melody.

Just ask Elton John, Billy Joel, John Legend, or Alicia Keys.
Kids, as well as adults, love being able to play chords and sing songs.

That was the goal.

Not to necessarily be a virtuoso but leave that option open for the future, to be conversant with the instrument, to make a sound that makes the performer as well as the listener smile.

To acquire the skills to make music for the rest of their lives.