Guitar Lessons Tulsa | Guitar Advice
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
In this podcast, we’re going to be talking about advice for beginning guitar students. Some advice for beginning guitar students is very helpful because you want to start off on the right foot, the best step you want to take as your first step. You want to make sure that that type of that step is solid and that you feel confident. And I feel like you can accomplish anything that you’re about to learn and go into. So that further due. My name is Stephen. I’ve been a music instructor for six years now, meaning that I’ve been teaching music for six years now. I’ve had my own guitar students since I was 18. I am now 23, so going on six years and I’ve enjoyed every single minute of it.
It’s been a joy to get, to learn and to grow and to teach. And I think one of the greatest, one of the best guitar lessons Tulsa that I’ve learned is that, you know, when you teach, you actually learn as well. One of the best ways to learn is to teach. It makes you have to solidify what you know and makes you solidify what you know so that you are teaching. It makes you question, you know, what you know. And so, Oh, further ado. We were talking about having advice for beginning. What is our advice for beginning guitar students? My advice for beginning guitar students, you know, in my experience as a beginner guitar student, I was very actually very well trained by ear. You know, I wasn’t necessarily trained in guitar lessons Tulsa.
When I say I was trained, I mean that I had been learning guitar by ear since I was 12 and I got started taking guitar lessons Tulsa at 16. So about four years in between there I had been learning guitar. I’d been playing for about an hour a day in guitar lessons Tulsa. I applied myself, I took it, I learned and I’ve been doing this thing. I’ve been, I’ve been working it yet with no instruction and only a few YouTube videos. I didn’t really even know what to look up. I can be YouTube, you know. So asking, asking, knowing what questions to ask, was it really important?
And it’s something I didn’t even have early on. I just kind of wanted to start learning songs and so I started learning songs and I started writing my own songs and I’m at 13 and so I think that you know, early on sometimes you don’t need to take guitar lessons Tulsa right away. Sometimes you need to allow yourself to just learn and enjoy the instrument. I would say, you know, for beginning concern students, if you don’t learn to enjoy the instrument, then you know you probably won’t be in this thing for a long time. If you don’t enjoy something, if you don’t find the joy in something you don’t enjoy joy in the instrument, then you know probably won’t last long anyway.
So find that for yourself. What do you, what do you enjoy doing? Are you learning guitar because someone else told you to do it or didn’t learning something because it looks cool or you learn it because man, you’re like interested. Are you interested? Don’t take on the interest of others. Just are you interested? You know, my dad put a demand on me as a kid and really all of my siblings as we’re playing on the living room floor with toys and in front of the TV, he comes home from work one Christmas in 20 or 2008 I believe, and says with a small guitar in his hand, somebody is gonna learn how to play this. And I raised my little hand and said, I’ll do it.
So I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to make dad happy or something, but I thought it was, I was up for the challenge. I was like, Hey, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I can do it. I want to be competent. I want to be confident. I want to be competent. So I did it. I took it from him. He got it. He gave it to me and I went about plucking it and I stuck with it. I just stuck with it. But how as a 12 year old kid, does he know it? There’s a little boy, no. Hey, stick with something. I had good parents apparently. So I stuck with it for four years. I had been planning it for about an hour a day. I loved it. I enjoyed it. I had fun with it.
I could get sound out at this thing that we’re coming from the inside of me naturally, and I started picking out chords before I even knew they were core. Just started picking up notes and writing songs before I knew what they were. These things were called. I started playing E minor chords and minor and major chords before I even even in ever knew what they were called. However, when I got guitar lessons Tulsa at 16 from who is now my brother in law, I flourished. I went further faster. Now some of you may say, well, Hey, you would’ve gone way further faster if you would have gotten guitar lessons Tulsa first. You know, Hey, I think that’s a hindrance. I think sometimes that first four years for me was a, was a, was a test CFA.
You know, if I pick this up, am I going to stick with it? It’s not about the knowledge yet. It’s about the enjoyment. It’s not about the details yet. It’s about the love. Do you love it? And I grew, I fell in love with guitar. I fell in love with music. I fell in love with playing and getting to, to make sounds from my soul, from from my heart, from my spirit, from myself. And then I got the details and the instruction afterwards, which helped advance me further, faster. But I remember at the time, I’ve been playing with for by year for, for four years.
And when he started putting names to things like minors and majors, it clicked. It clicked. And so I’m thankful to God that that is the way I learned. I would never trade it. I would never trade my learning experience. And so the point is, is you know, advice for going to guitar players is just to find the love in something. Find the love in guitar first. Maybe you don’t need to get guitar lessons Tulsa yet. Will that hurt my pocket? Not necessarily. I don’t need your money. We don’t need your money. We need your life. We need you to enjoy what you do when other people need you to enjoy what you do.
So don’t do it for lousy reasons. Do it for something that pulls from. It pulls on you, tugs at your heart. It tugs at your, your desire. Does music speak to you? You know, does, do you speak to music? Do you speak to that instrument? Do you speak through that instrument? Think of that instrument as a mouthpiece or as a puppet that is speaking. What do you want it to say? You know, that’s what, that’s what that guitar is. And so my advice for you, beginner students is to fall in love with your instrument. Play it all the time. Anytime you can pick it up, pick it up, play it toy with it as much as possible. I guarantee you it’ll accelerate your guitar lessons Tulsa with us at Curtis music Academy.
It’ll help you to enjoy what it is you’re doing. I think instruction is very, very good, but I think that tinkering with things and you figuring it out. Also, you playing with the guitar, you’ll start to find things and question things and that’s where we can help you the most is when you’re, you’re, you’re questioning your own experience. You’re questioning your own knowledge, you’re questioning your own. What’s you’re hearing the guitar make? How do you get that sound? You know, how do I do a HAMP? You know, how do I pluck the string and make it sound like I just hit it or like it just bounced. Well that’s called the hammer on or pull off. Oh that’s what that’s called. That makes so much sense.
And you start to kind of, the picture starts to get clearer and clearer. You know, sometimes when things are just given to you, you don’t really appreciate the value of them. And that’s what I fear for a lot of these students who parents have a lot of, you know, the parents just give it, throw them in the controller since I think it’s great, but I love what my parents did and that that’s, they just handed to me first it was a cheap guitar. They made a cheap investment. But you know, this thing actually sustained some of my family, this, this is, this is what I get to do and I get to make money and take care of my wife with, you know, guitar is, music is a way of life for me. Music is what I use to pay my bills. Music is what I do now, and I love it. I absolutely love it.
This is the best job in the world, teaching music, and I’m so grateful and so I have so much joy. I feel like I don’t even have a job because I get to do this. You know, I don’t say I have to do this. I say, I can get to do this. So my advice to you, beginners is to grow in love, fall in love with your guitar, with your guitar teacher, and fall in love with music. That is my advice to you.