How To Play Guitar.

For the Music Teacher: How to Teach a Song to Your Guitar Class, Part 2

2011-12-17T02:26:04Z

Learning the Second Chord and Switching Sides

After the students have learned the first chord, and played along with the song, then teach the second chord the same way (D6 for Horse With No Name). This time have the rest 4 beats then play 4 beats. So they’re resting on the Em, playing on the D6. The teacher can also alternate with the students. Once they can do that, divide the class into two parts and have one side play Em the other D6. Play along with the song. To keep continuity you could have them play while alternating on the verse, sing along with the chorus, then each side will switch the chords they play on the next verse. This is a great time for the teacher to circulate and fix any issues with chords, since they’re only playing one chord per side, or with hand position, or picking patterns, etc.

Switching Chords

By this point the students should be familiar with the song, and have had plenty of experience playing each chord. The next step is to switch chords. Show the class (use the camera and LCD if you have one) how the first finger move up a string, the second finger moves down a string from the Em to D6. See if they can move both fingers together, give them a minute or two to practice it by themselves. Make this a habit too, they need to time to work out the kinks on their own, especially if they don’t have guitars at home. Have the class play along with you at a slow speed, switching chords. Once they’re feeling comfortable have them play along with the song. Again, have them sing the chorus, or count beats or anything that keeps them engaged and listening.

A Fork in the Road

At this point you’ve got several options, you can:

Learn the chords for the chorus
Learn a right hand pattern
Practice singing and playing at the same time
Learn how to read chord charts.

If you’re going to teach the chords in the chorus, you’ll basically follow the same pattern for learning the verse chords. In fact, you can use this lesson as a template on how to learn songs.

If you’re going to teach a right hand picking pattern you might have to take a step backwards. Don’t focus on changing chords – just play one chord for 4 beats, then rest for 4 beats, like when your first learned the chord, unless the students are really solid with changing the chords. When you’re first learning guitar it’s tricky to strum a rhythm pattern and change chords. While the eventual goal is to see right hand and left hand technique as one integrated skill, it’s best to compartmentalize them at first.

Playing and Singing at the Same Time

If you decide that playing and singing at the same time is your next goal, you’ll also have to simplify things in the left and right hand department. The easiest way is to have the students only play the chords on beat one. Go line by line with the song, have the students listen to you play the chord changes and figure out what word the chord changes on. For example in “Horse With No Name” – On the first part of the journey, etc. The Em comes on the word “first” the D6 on the word “journey”. Have the students play the chord one time when they sing the words first or journey, etc. Which brings us to the next part,,,

Reading Chord Charts

If your students can change chords on the right words, then have them write the chord charts. The teacher can play the song slowly, letting the students watch the teachers fingers. Go line by line and figure out which word to put the chords on. If you’ve got an easy song with a repetitive chord progression they can play, then it’s much more authentic and engaging to have the students figure out the chord charts, instead of the teacher putting the chart up, then explaining it then playing it.

Summary

You can use these techniques for any song that you like. You’ll find as the students get more confident with the guitar, that you can spend less time on technique, and more time on concepts, like musicality, feel, dynamics or form. You can even start talking about lyrics, and what the composers intentions were.

When you’re teaching new songs try to find the easiest part of the song to play, and learn that first. You want your students to spend more time playing than you spend talking. The sooner they start playing, the better.

Download .pdf How to Teach a Song Part 2

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For the Music Teacher: How to Teach a Song to Your Guitar Class, Part 1

2011-11-21T02:33:56Z

Objective

Teachers will learn various methods and procedures for teaching a song to a class of guitar students. Including:

Songs to start with.
“Non confusing” nomenclature.
Right and left hand technique.
Non threatening (for you and students!) assessments .
Reading chord charts.

Materials

Not everybody has all these materials, but here are some things (besides guitars and picks) that will make your life easier.

Computer
LCD projector or overhead projector
Presentation program (Power Point, Keynote, Google Docs, etc)
Video camera and AV out cord.

Learning the Landmarks

A lot of these have been covered before, like “What to do on the first day”, and various right and left hand techniques. This is a step by step process of how to teach a song, and incorporate chart reading, and specific guitar techniques. Every song you teach can be approached different ways, and you can pull specific techniques out of each one like, picking patterns, chord shapes, stylistic feel, left or right hand muting, and more. Learning these techniques in context of the song is much more fun than drills and isolation studies especially in beginner students.

The first thing you should do is go over the parts of the guitar paying special attention to the strings, frets, the nut and the bridge. Those are the major landmarks on the guitar, and you’ll use them to indicate position.

It’s better to say,”move your hand towards the nut or bridge”, instead of up or down the neck. New students don’t know which is up or down and you’ll be facing them, so your up or down is backwards to them.

A lot of 9 and 10 year olds don’t know their right from their left (or don’t know it intuitively) , so you should can say pick hand and neck hand.

If you’re working with elementary school students they can get confused when you start saying fret two string five, so if you start naming the left hand by numbers, they’ll really be confused when you say “fret two, string two, finger two” . It’s less confusing if you say, index, middle, ring, pinky.

It can also be confusing to younger or beginner students if you say “high string and low string”. If you’re not a musician high and low means position, not pitch. Instead you can say the string closest to your nose (or ceiling) or the string closer to the floor. Remember your goal is to start playing music, not to spend all your time teaching vocabulary. Just make sure that the vocabulary you use isn’t technically incorrect. For example: the string closest to your nose is the lowest sounding string, and is called that in “proper” guitar-speak. However once your students have learned to think of low as pitch and not position, it won’t be too confusing to call it the low string. In the mean time say the string closest to your nose or closest to the floor, which doesn’t even mention high or low.

Learning the Chords

In this example we’ll use the song “Horse With No Name” by America. It’s not too fast, it uses 4 chords, all the chords use 2 fingers (index and middle), and they use the 2nd fret and all 6 strings.

Start by teaching the Em chord, use fingers 1 and 2, not 2 and 3 as are typically used. If you’re got a large class and a computer or video camera and LCD projector, use the webcam or camera to project your fingers up on the board. A camera is especially useful because you can pick it up and turn it to look at your fingers from the players point of view. You can also turn it to look straight down the neck to see the fingers on their tips, you can also show the thumb position too.

After you’ve showed them the chord, and most seem to be getting it, have them look at their neighbors hands, and help their neighbor if they need it. You can group them into partners or just have the students look to the immediate right or left. If they’re in partners have one student be the student and the other be the teacher, the teacher helps the student get their chords. (Remind the “teachers” it’s their responsibility, if the students don’t get it.) Then have the students switch roles with the teachers. You’ll find the second group plays better than the first, because they’ll fix their own mistakes after having fixed others. Make this a regular habit, and you’ll find all of your students thinking more critically about their playing.

Playing the Chords in Context

Don’t wait until the chords are perfect to play a song, when the whole class plays, and it sounds like an Em, then start working on the right hand technique. Have the students echo you 4 beats of Em, you play then they play, using all down strokes. Once they can do that have them play first then you play 4 beats of D6. So they play | Em / / / | you play | D6 / / / |. Then have them “air guitar” with the actual recording. That is, they move their pick but don’t actually strum the strings. Have the say 1,2,3,4 while they’re (pretend) playing and rest, rest, rest, rest, when they’re not. What you want is for them to hear how the song goes, without having to worry about picking and keeping their fingers in the right spot. After they “air guitar” have them play for real, along with the song (or with the teacher alternating the D6 chords)

Summary

By this point you might have spent a month just learning two chords. If your class is every day a week and your students get to practice at home, you may have spent just a few days. Don’t be afraid to go slow at first. You should “front load” your effort. The more time you spend getting the chords and right hand comfortable, the quicker they’ll learn the next song.

You don’t want to bore students of course. So always keep adding levels of complexity. If they can change chords with a quarter note pattern in the right hand, then add a more complex right hand pattern. (See part 2)Play along with the recording. Play along with a student drummer. Try to sing and play at the same time. Have half the class accompany, have the other half sing. Take the chords and mix them up, play them for longer duration or a different order. Every song you do has a wealth of material you can use to teach musical concepts.

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Guitar Lesson Plans: Alternate D Chord

2011-10-05T00:17:38Z

Objective

Students will learn and alternate fingering for the D chord that will work with any D chord

Background

The open D chord is one of the first chords anyone learns on guitar, after awhile though you might want to spice it up a bit. By changing your fingering, you can free up your pinky to do some extra things. Many students ever find the new fingering easier than the “traditional” fingering.

Fingerings

The “new” D chord might look kind of tricky, but it’s not really. You lay your pointer finger across strings 1-3 and then use your 2nd finger to play string two. You can also use your pinky finger to play the first string 5th fret. It shouldn’t even be a stretch and it give a more “sparkling” sound to your D chord.

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Guitar Lesson Plans: Introduction to Guitar Video

2011-09-25T00:03:26Z

I teach class guitar at a school with a really transient population. As a result we’re having students that come in almost weekly, that have never played guitar before. It gets to the point where I could do an “intro to guitar” per week, so I made a video. Now the new kids can watch the video and hopefully be up to speed with what a fret is, how to count the strings etc. Nobody will learn to play guitar from this video, but at least when you say second fret, they’ll know what you’re talking about.

One caveat: In our class if students touch the tuners, they put the guitar away for the day. You might not want to be so draconian, but with 40+ students at a time, I’d be replacing strings and tuning guitars daily. So, I mention that in the video.

I’ve made the language really simple, we have a lot of non-native speakers too, so it’s in short, simple sentences. I’m going to try to get one of my Spanish speaking friends to translate it, and do a Spanish voiceover too. That will be in a separate post, if and when that happens.

Script to “Welcome to Guitar”

Welcome to guitar class. This video will show you the parts of the guitar, how to hold the guitar, and how we make music with the guitar.Lets go over the parts of the guitar first. This is the body of the guitar. It is curved to fit on your leg like this. The body of the guitar goes on your right leg. This is the bridge of the guitar, it is where the strings are attached to the body.

This is the neck of the guitar. The strings go over the end of the guitar at the nut. On the neck of your guitar are spaces called frets. They help us change the sound of the guitar. We start counting the frets at the nut. Like this: fret 1, fret 2, fret 3, fret 4, and so on.

This is the head of the guitar. These are the tuners where the strings are attached. Do Not Touch The Tuners! You could break a string or make the guitar sound bad. If your teacher sees you touching the tuners, they will ask you to put the guitar away for the day. Do not forget!

There are six strings on the guitar, we start counting them from the bottom like this: string 1, string 2, string 3, string 4, string 5, string 6. String 1 is the thinnest string, string 6 is the thickest.

Here is how we hold the guitar. We put the body on our right leg, the neck of the guitar points to our left. Our right arm goes over the guitar, and helps hold it. Our right hand holds the pick, and strums the strings. Here is how to hold the pick: Put your right hand in front of you like this. Curve your pointer finger like this. Put the pick on top of your pointer finger. The pick you point right at you. Then hold the pick in place with your thumb. You can let your other fingers curl up a little, but not too much.

Our left hand goes on the neck. Our thumb is in the back of the neck pointing straight up like this. Our fingers curve so that they can touch the strings on the tips, like this. We use our finger tips, not our finger prints.

Notice how the strings are floating above the neck. We push them down with the tips of our fingers until they touch the neck. That is how we change the sound of the guitar and make music.

Now you know the parts of the guitar, the body, neck, head, bridge, nut, and tuners. You know strings 1,2,3,4,5,6, and you know how to counts the frets. Frets 1,2,3,4. You know how to hold the guitar and how to hold the pick. You also know how to push the strings down, to change their sound. Now you’re ready to start making music.

Here’s the download in .mov format, it’s large, but I wanted to be able to display it through an LCD projector and not lose too much resolution.

Welcome to Guitar

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Guitar Lesson Plans: Arranging a Song

2012-04-18T01:54:36Z

If you’re a non-guitarist music teacher, you might not be familiar with pop arranging. The nice thing about a pop song is that there are some really simple things to do, that can really spice up a song – they’re also fairly common in the pop idiom, so it’s not going to sound strange to the average person’s ears. You might also have an ensemble that doesn’t yet have the skill to play a song note for note. That’s ok too, as long as you get the chords and melody, people are going to recognize the song.

Lets take a look at how you can take a song and make it your own. Maybe you want to do a song and add your own flair, maybe a song is too difficult and you’d like to simplify it, or maybe you have a song that you’ve simplified, but you’d like to spice up the arrangement. You can even use these tricks with a song you or your students have written.

This lesson will cover:

Introductions
Modifying chords
Differentiating verse and chorus
Solo sections

Introductions

First decide if you want to start with a bang, or if you want to start slow and build up. If you’ve got a long song, it’s probably better to start slow and get progressively more complex.
All the instruments come in at once, and play once through the verse section with no vocals.
Repeat the first chord of the verse for 4 to 8 measures until the singer comes in (ex. Ob La Di by The Beatles).
Have the guitar player play the chord progression of the verse by themselves one time the the whole band and singer come in (ex. The Middle by Jimmy Eat World).
Have the guitar player play the first 4 measures of the verse, the rest of the band join for the last 4, and then the singer come in.
Mix and match, have drums and bass play, or guitar and bass. Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day, has the electric guitar start, the acoustic join, then the singer, then the bass and drums.
Modifying Chords

Sometimes a song is too good not to play, but it’s really hard or has chords your group doesn’t know. Here’s what you can do.

Generally a chord lasting 2 beats or less can be left out.
Substitute a power chord
Here’s a general rule that works if you know what notes are in a chord: If two chords share 2 or more notes they can usually be substituted for each other for example: G (G,B,D) and Em (E,G,B) or F (F, A, C) and Am (A, C, E). This doesn’t always work, but it works in a lot of situations and it’s a great way to spice up your songwriting too.

Differentiating Verse and Chorus

You’ll want your chorus to sound different than your verse, usually if the chorus has different chords than the verse that’s enough, but you can do more. If your verse and chorus share the same chords (ex. The Middle by Jimmy Eat World, Time of Our Lives by Miley Cyrus) you’ll need to do something to differentiate. Try these:

Change the type of chords on the chorus, go from power chords to open chords or vice versa.
Change your guitar sound, go from clean to distortion, go from palm mute to no palm mute, or change your pickup selector if playing electric. Strum closer to the neck, or closer to the bridge if using acoustic guitars (you can also palm mute on acoustic too…)
Add another instrument on the chorus, if you’ve got acoustic guitar, add another acoustic, add electric, or add a piano. Think of the voice as another instrument – double a vocal line or add harmony. Add a percussion instrument like shaker or tambourine on the chorus
Change the drum beat, if that’s too complex or you only know one beat, then try same beat, different cymbal – have the drummer use the hi-hat on the verse then change to the ride cymbal on the chorus. Another cool one is to play the hi-hat part on the floor tom for the chorus

Solo Sections

Solos can really spice up a song, but sometime people thing you’ve got to have amazing skills to pull it off. Of course amazing skill never hurts, but here’s some things you can do that are easy and sound good.

The 4 note solo (scale tones 5, 6, 1, 2 from a major scale) can add a lot to a song, try it! Throw in a couple of string bends to spice it up.
Have an instrument play the vocal melody. You’ll never go wrong using the melody as the solo. (ex. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana).
Have an instrument (or group) play their part while the band drops out. For example the guitars play the verse while everybody else drops out for 4 measures. Or guitars play their part, and drums play just the hi-hat rhythm, or just a bass drum rhythm on all 4 beats. Let just the bass and drum play.
Let the singer improvise a melody on a neutral syllable.

Hopefully some of these tips will give you some ideas for spicing up an arrangement. Mix and match whatever sounds good to you. It’s all rock and roll

Download the Arranging a Song .pdf

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