 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  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”.  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”. |
AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
February 2025
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