Mar 022015
 

smallfryHave you ever taught someone how to play an instrument, even the start-up bits of teaching an instrument? Despite still being a ham-fisted guitarist after 35+ years of playing, I’ve not shied away from doing my best to teach a few people the rudiments of playing guitar. My first “student” was Mike, a neighborhood friend and member of my first band. We were 15 or 16. He had recently acquired his first guitar, just a few months after I got my first electric and resumed lessons after first trying to play when I was about 10 years old. From the start, I was training him to be the other guitarist in our band. He outplayed me within a year, which in part earned him his walking papers. Shame on me!

My next “student” was another old friend, another Mike, who had already been learning the guitar but who needed my individual training to prepare him for the rigors of our band. My first order of business was breaking him of his fascination with the dual guitar leads of his then-favorite band, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Rather than break him of his Southern Rock roots, we ended up finding a way to merge his style into our sound. It led to a wonderful collaboration and extended through our band’s “classic”-era years. Once, while recording songs for an eventual 7-inch at our favorite studio in Rockville, Maryland, Mike was ripping off an outstanding solo on a Clash-inspired song while the rest of us sat in the booth with the engineer.

“What’s that he’s playing,” our usually mild-mannered engineer blurted out, “you’re gonna let him play that?!?!”

“What’s wrong with it,” one of us said, “we think it’s great.”

“It sounds like fucking Southern Rock. How can you have a Southern Rock solo in a punk song?”

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  9 Responses to “Teacher, Teacher”

  1. misterioso

    Look out, Yngwie J. Malmsteen!

  2. BigSteve

    Congratulations. Both times I tried to teach someone the guitar it was a disaster. I’m apparently the “why can’t you just do it? it’s so easy” kind of teacher, sad to say.

  3. Your troubles don’t surprise me. You would be like Ted Williams trying to manage the Senators. The great ones usually can’t teach.

  4. 2000 Man

    I remember I wanted to play guitar when I was a kid, and I wanted this really cool Fender Mustang that was in the window of a guitar shop I walked past all the time. It was the kind where the body is wood in the middle, then kind of red and black on the edges. It was reasonably priced, too. Mom said I could get a guitar but I had to have lessons. I wanted lessons at the guitar store, but mom knew a guy. Well, the guy was about 200 years old. I think he invented the guitar. He said I had to play an acoustic to learn and I didn’t get the mustang, I got some no name Japanese acoustic that everyone said played really well and was really nice. I also got The Beatles guitar book.

    Needless to say, I truly hated everything about the whole deal. I wanted to learn how to play Wild Thing and I got stuck with Norwegian Wood. I really couldn’t stand that old man.

  5. How many guitar dreams have been snuffed out by “having” to learn on acoustic?

  6. I’m currently giving pointers to a friend who’s just taking up the guitar.

    I have no training/can’t read music/don’t know anything about theory that I haven’t learned for listening to records/etc. So there are techniques that I stumbled upon on my own that would have allowed me to advance at a much quicker rate if someone had only showed me. As a result, I err on the side of trying to cram too much down the funnel at once. I suppose that makes me more patient a teacher than Big Steve but with the same flaw. I do tend to ask “Is this too much?” in the middle of a lesson.

    One thing I do to try to demystify the whole guitar thing is to identify 4 notes in a scale on the middle two strings and have the student play them in any order while I strum cords underneath. Let them play a lead for a bit so they can see that it is doable almost right away. Then it’s just a matter of putting in more time so that you can do it better and better.

  7. Mod, wasting time and making mistakes in a band makes perfect sense to me. Lots of hidden life lessons to be learned about teamwork, ego, shared glory and defeats, on and on…

  8. machinery

    I know this is going to seem like blasphemy here, but given Jakob’s love of music AND computer games, would he be a candidate for that RockSmith game? From what I’ve read you plug a real guitar into the game and play along with real rock songs, etc … It gets great reviews.

    Yes, I understand stones will be thrown by the musicians here 🙂

  9. I’ll ask him about that. He’s pretty old school in his music snobbery; in fact, he’s into lots of pre-rock music and makes fun of me for being too rock oriented.

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