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Teaching Class Guitar Lessons Week 1
On many occasions during the past year I have been asked to teach individual guitar lessons. Instead of doing private guitar lessons, like I have done in the past, I decided to try a different approach. I put a small article in our church magazine indicating that I would be teaching a 6 week class for beginning guitar players one hour, once a week. I had never tried teaching a guitar class before but I thought it might be fun, and at least be different.
I advertised for about 3 weeks. I told people if they were interested to email me and let me know. I had a few inquiries on Sundays, a phone call or two and an email. I really was wondering what I should expect. Would anyone come? Who would they be?
Thursday night we had our first class. I had 12 students; 3 kids, 2 youth and 7 adults. As I was warned by a fellow blogger and worship leader, the first 20 minutes we spent on tuning. But we also were able to cover the parts of a guitar, how to hold a pick, alternate picking, the names of the strings, what half steps, whole, steps are, what makes up a major scale, how you get a triad, and how to play a G and C chord.
It was alot for one night and I will be interested to see how much they retain for the next week. I plan on using video to put demonstrations on our church website and using video to answer questions they have during the week. When I get some of those up I will definately show you the links.
So if you have taught or were going to teach a beginner guitar class, what would you cover in your next lesson?
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I’ve thought about doing the same at our church. I had half planned on doing such last summer and very well might offer for this summer. I had considered scheduling it for an hour “lesson” sesson followed by an hour (or whatever) jam session. I was hoping this would attract other non-beginner players to both help with instruction as well as just all around fun playing together. I’m looking forward to more of your experiences!
I’m so happy to find this blog! I would say, get your students playing real music as quickly as possible. Once they’re hooked, start working in foundational excercises along with working on specific songs.
I’ve got tons of easy songs on my free guitar chords page on my teaching website. Not worship songs, but I think many would be appropriate.
My blog on my site often discusses guitar teaching, too. Check it out!
Rob
I am glad to have found this. My church put me in charge of teaching class guitar for 6 weeks this summer. About 8 years ago I taught myself how to play guitar and had a year and a half of lessons in college, but no other training. This is helpful in knowing approximately what to expect.
There are two things I thought about doing to help with the wide range of experience:
1) Have a half hour to an hour pre-lesson before the class to go over basic repairs and stringing lessons and to get at least some guitars tuned up before we start.
2) After the lesson have the more experienced guitarist go to a separate space to give them more challenging homework for the week.
Any suggestions, comments, or lessons to share?
I made it clear from the beginning that this was for beginning guitar players. So I didn’t have too many advanced people but that sounds like a good idea. Something else is to have the advanced guitar players helping out the beginners if they are willing. That increases your effectiveness. I found that 6 weeks was a little too long. I got through everything in about 4. We learned how to make chords, the basic chords (about 12 or so) and then some strumming patterns. I then told them the best thing they could do was to keep playing and keep practicing.