Tulsa Guitar Lessons | Curriculum For a Laid Back Guitarist
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
As a guitar instructor in Tulsa. One of the questions that I receive a few times a month is what is it that you teach when a student only wants to be able to play a few songs at a campfire, they don’t really have any desire to shred on their solos or to play songs on the electric guitar. Really their goal is to just be able to sit down at a family reunion and play through some really basic songs. So what is the curriculum that I would use to be able to achieve this goal for this student? And that is a very good question because the truth is that’s actually not a very lofty goal. It’s not a difficult thing to allow a student over the course of a few months to be able to play these songs all by themselves with the strumming pattern and with a set of chords to be able to play a song around the campfire that they enjoy playing.
So the first thing that we would do is just like any other guitar player, if they’re a beginning guitar player, we would want to make sure that we just talk about all of the different aspects of the guitar. And we would talk about how notes are able to be changed through placing your finger on the strings and placing your fingers on specific frets and how that is going to be changing, hang the notes on the guitar. And so we would do that regardless of whether somebody is just wanting to play a few songs or whether they are trying to master the instrument to play some Solos. So because of this, it helps anyone that is learning to play an instrument to understand the ins and outs of the guitar and it helps them to just understand the instrument more deeply. So through the course of the first few weeks, we will explain how the guitar is used to play notes.
And through the course of probably a month we’re going to get through a handful of, and the important thing to mention is a lot of people have no understanding of the difference between a note and a cord. So if you were to play the g chord, a lot of people that play guitar or other instruments don’t necessarily understand what notes we need to play in order to play the g major chord. And this is something that you can talk about with your instructors, with your student to help them understand chords and notes a little bit easier. So if you explain to them how to play a handful of chords, go ahead and teach them how these notes relate to each other and how a grouping of notes is used to play a specific chord. And this is really going to help them to see just how it is that you would be playing chords.
And then as you are teaching them cords. Another thing that you would want to do is explain to them the concept of key signatures, even if it’s not in depth. So for instance, if I explained to a guitar student that is taking Tulsa Guitar Lessons that if we are in the key of g we are going to be using this specific set of courts and I explained to him which courts we would use. I don’t have to get into the fact that the key of g has one sharp and the sharp that we would have is f and so if we’re going to be using this key, then we would want to know all of the notes and know all the major scales. Now, depending on how deep the student is wanting to get, we would absolutely cover key signatures and major scales and ensure that they not only are able to play a major scale, but also be able to understand the notes that they are using to play that major scale. So this is something that is very important for someone who is wanting to master the instrument.
But if you’re just wanting to play a few notes here and there and play a few songs, then it’s really, I deal that you spend a lot of time covering this content because you really want to just get them started with being able to play songs that they know and that they enjoy. This is going to be the most ideal situation for you getting started with Tulsa Guitar Lessons, so
once this specific student is able to go along and play different things, you may find that though they’ll probably start changing their goal and if they are able to master playing a couple of their favorite songs after just a few months, then they’re going to realize how quickly they’re able to learn and they’re going to actually really enjoy. Playing the guitar and playing their favorite songs and very likely you will be able to convince them to dive even deeper into the Tulsa Guitar Lessons because if they’re just wanting to play a couple of their favorite songs at a family reunion or something like that, it’s really not going to take that long
It’ll probably take six to 12 months to learn that set of goals. So if you are able to teach them for awhile and they’re really enjoying their Tulsa Guitar Lessons, then you can go ahead and probably help them go along and play a few different things so that they can continue on with learning that instrument. And this is probably the time to start adapting your curriculum to go through and teach different aspects of the guitar. You could teach the ins and outs of major scales and modes and inner Walik differences between notes and major thirds, minor thirds, perfect fourths. All of those intervals are going to be really helpful as any musician. But yeah, it really doesn’t need to be said until this student is ready to understand this concept and move forward with the more difficult aspects of learning the Tulsa Guitar Lessons. So this is something that I would hold off on.
I wouldn’t introduce many difficult things until they’re ready to step out of the box and really enjoy learning the more difficult aspects of the guitar. And you can actually teach a student for quite a long time, even if they don’t have any interest in learning scales or learning modes. And that’s because a student that just wants to play their favorite songs. There’s a lot of different aspects that you could instruct them on. There’s dynamics, there’s strumming patterns, picking patterns. There’s many different chords. You could just bolster that cord arsenal in their pocket. That way they could go into any song in any key and just dominate playing this song. And this is something that anybody that just wants to play their favorite song would benefit from being able to play many different chords in many strumming patterns and to the point where they no longer need instruction to be able to do that. And this is why you can teach somebody, even if they just want to play their favorite songs at a family reunion.