Tulsa Guitar Scales | Taking Your First Guitar Lesson
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hi, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy here with another podcast on one of our guitar lessons for adults, beginners. So I began speaking in the last session about one dollar lessons for adult beginners. And usually it’s people who don’t have any experience with music or any experience with playing the guitar. And like I mentioned in the last session, that is never an issue. In fact, I have taught many adult beginners and started off with zero experience. And just with that consistency of guitar lessons over six months or so, they are completely astounded and pleased with their progress. And so I would recommend it for any adult, if you have interest in music, guitar lessons are a must, in my opinion.
So we started off last session with the difference between reading sheet music or the difference between going a different route and reading chord charts and how they’re totally different. Another thing that I didn’t mention last time when I sit down with an adult beginner is I always ask them what their goals are for playing the guitar. If somebody comes in and they say, I want to learn how to play the blues on the guitar, I would not sit down with them and take them through a different genre of music. Like, I wouldn’t say you have to play Mozart’s Symphony before you can play the blues, right? I would say, OK, let’s just go in that direction of learning how to play the blues if they came in.
They say, I really like the songs by Elton John. But Elton John plays the piano, not the guitar! But anyways, I would not say, well, first you have to go through all of your Tulsa Guitar Scales before you do that. So Curtis Music Academy is different from many other music schools in that we don’t actually require that. You follow a certain list of things to do. Like if you want to learn how to record charts, we can start from day one, learning how to record charts. If you want to learn how to play Mozart, well, then we don’t need to go through the Beatles. Let it be right. We really focus on your specific goals. So that goes in general. Most people pick either one or two things. They’ll say, I want to learn how to read sheet music. Awesome.
So we start going in that direction or they say, I just want to learn how to play pop and contemporary music. So usually those are the predominant two choices for Tulsa Guitar Scales also have gotten people that say I want to learn how to write music and things like that. And so that is something that comes along a little bit later, because once you understand music at the beginning, it just builds on that and sooner or later they will be writing their own songs. So I ask them what their goals are for playing the guitar. And I also mentioned to them that we also take your individual song choices very seriously.
So obviously we do go through a guitar lesson book and the lesson books are great, they’re fun and they really do a good job of teaching people one thing at a time. Now, usually people don’t fall in love with the music in the guitar lesson books like if we took the whole Tulsa Guitar Scales book for the beginners, there might be one or two songs that they really love, but probably not every single one. Then that’s OK, because it’s really for the purpose of teaching you Tulsa Guitar Scales. Now, with that being said, I really like to supplement guitar lessons every few months or so with a really fun, good song. So with that being said, when I was a student and in sixth or seventh grade, I really wanted to learn how to play the Charlie Brown theme song on the guitar.
And it was just a really big desire in my heart. I didn’t want to learn how to play for Elise. I didn’t want to learn how to play Mozart. I just want to learn Charlie Brown. And so it was a huge deal for me when somebody got me the sheet music for that song and I learned it, I memorized it, and I was even able to play it at a spring recital and it was just everything I could have hoped it would be. And so with that memory in mind, I always put the goals of students first. So when a student comes in and they say, I want to play, I think I had a student last week say I want to learn how to play Tulsa Guitar Scales that’s in The Godfather music. I am very important to me.
I write it down and then throughout the week I look it up and make sure I can write it out and everything. And and for that particular one, I had to make sure I was talking about the right song because there’s several different songs in that movie. Another student of mine says, I want to play epic themes from many different Tulsa Guitar Scales. So like symphony themes that are arranged for the guitar or epic movies, things like that. So that’s really important to me. I’m not going to make him play a different genre of songs. I want to put songs in front of him that he really enjoys. So with those goal songs, I might do like maybe my goal is technically to a year and I might do even more than that for the students as they just tell me what they want.
And so students who are coming and just growing and learning and saying they have a. Lost a lot and they say, I want to play this song next.
Of course, we’re never going to say no to them, we’re just going to keep putting those Tulsa Guitar Scales in front of them. So we take the goals of our students very seriously. So we’ll tell you that the next part of the one dollar guitar lesson is actually opening up the book and talking about rhythm. So there’s a great page about hole notes, half notes, quarter notes and what they look like on paper and what they sound like to the ears. So we actually go through that exercise of playing whole notes, playing half notes, playing quarter notes and getting really used to seeing them on the page.
That is part of reading sheet music is looking at it on the page and being able to play it in your brain is actually working in great order. And it’s one of the best exercises for your brain to begin to play Tulsa Guitar Scales. And so it’s a great thing. And after we’ve done the whole notes and notes, quarter notes, we go on to the next page, which is learning the grand staff. And so for someone who has never seen what the grand stuff looks like, it can be kind of intimidating. So I usually take several minutes and just say it looks intimidating at first, but we’re actually only going to talk about one note starting off for guitar lessons.
And so most people are relieved at that. So a part of the grand staff is we have the trouble and we have the bass clef basically that’s dividing Tulsa Guitar Scales into two different parts. The treble clef is middle C and higher. The bass clef is middle and lower. So I always kind of make a joke and say the middle C is an important special note. It’s on the two claps, but no other note does that. So we talk about that. We talk about how both the trouble in the bass clef have five lines and four spaces on them. Notes sit on either a line or a space and the music starts off with the bass clef with low notes and it literally just steps up lines, bass lines in space all the way up to the high notes.