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”.
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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