Sunday, August 28th 2022 – An Update
Since finishing part one (open chords) of my Guitar From Scratch Experience back in September 2021, I’ve spent the past year trying the methods out on new students.
This is what I discovered:
We’re all Individuals!
I knew this already, but this has experience has reinforced it.
What works for me, doesn’t work for everyone.
Each individual benefits greatly from a learning method tailored to his/her learning preferences, living circumstances, and personaity.
I’m super pleased with the methods and ideas discovered from my Guitar From Scratch experience. They work wonderfully. But they absolutely need to be tailored to the individual.
Small, Quick Wins
During my Guitar From Scratch experience, I was happy enough to slog through the monotonous chord (jump) changes. But other people are not! I think it comes down to the fact that I know it will come if I keep at it because essentially I’ve done it before (right-handed). But for other people (kids, retired folk and adults with full-time jobs and kids to look after) smaller, consistent wins work much better.
People Want To Play Music
This is pretty obvious, but people want to play music more than anything else. Whereas I was quite happy to listen to the TV in the background whilst monotonously powering through the same chord changes, most other people are not this way inclined. Most people prefer something easier, more musical, interesting and fresh.
All in All
All in all, the above discoveries above are not really new to me – I’ve been teaching for a long time. But it was really interesting to observe how others responded to the ideas and concepts, and it felt tremendously beneficial to more closely relate to and discuss how learning guitar feels with other beginner guitar students.
I’m really pleased with how it’s all worked out so far!
A Guitar From Scratch Course?
At the very start of this adventure, my intention was to create a course out of the experience. Now that I’ve gone through the process myself and test tried the ideas on others, I think I’m in a good position to start putting things together.
I’m not entirely sure what I create will be in the form of an A to B course though. I think it might be more along the lines of a group of lessons outlining ideas and concepts that can be used in various ways for each individual.
We’ll see though.