September,
and a new school year brings a new raft of students picking up the
guitar for the first time. Now, at the risk of sounding like a
curmudgeonly old git – you young 'uns, don't know yer born, in
my day electric guitars were powered by steam – let me just say
this:
You've
never had it so good.
The
fact is, even a cheap Chinese Strat knock-off from Argos is at least
going to a) work, b) stay roughly in tune for 15-30 minutes,
c) not have an action so high it cuts your fingers to ribbons just
trying to get a note out of the damn thing. If you've been smart and
got your guitar from the local music shop, chances are you've got
something even better. Precision computer controlled manufacturing
techniques may lack the magic of a handcrafted Gibson, but they do at
least ensure consistency and good quality control. The days of warped
fretboards, actions so high you could park a bus under the strings
and tuning less stable than a North Korean dictator are mercifully a
thing (largely) of the past.
It's
the same with amps – even the humblest practice amp carries an
overdrive, probably a reverb unit and enough EQ that a halfway decent
set of tones can be coaxed from it. Once again, if you've been smart
and got your package from a music shop, they'll probably have sold
you something made by Marshall, Line 6, Fender or Vox – these amps
have incredible fucntionality, often including modelling software to
emulate tones recorded on classic rock songs as well as modulation
and delay effects and mp3 player inputs to allow you to jam along to
your favourite tracks to your heart's content.
By
comparison, my first amp (a “Piggy” - no, seriously, that was the
brand name) had no distortion, no reverb, and sounded like an empty
shoebox. The first decent sounding amp I got was a secondhand
Sessionette 75, which sounded glorious when it could actually be
coaxed into working. And jamming to mp3s? We used cassettes.
Think about that. Oh, the nineties...
Anyway,
the point of all this wistful nostalgia – when it comes to learning
guitar, you the student have more options than ever. Books,
magazines, CDs (yes, ok, we had them to), YouTube,
UltimateGuitar.com, Guitar Pro.. there are no end of tabs to be
downloaded off the internet. And much of it is free. So why, then,
would you shell out your hard earned money for that most antiquated
of devies – a teacher?
The
answer is simple. A teacher – a good one, anyway – takes you
through things from first principles, so that each step builds
logically on what has gone before. Some questions that a student has
cannot be answered immediately without ensuring that student has the
bedrock of knowledge to understand the answer. An example – a
student asked me if Sweet Child O' Mine was in G or D. Technically,
it's in D Mixolydian – but telling him that would have done nothing
except demonstrate that I know a big word. Before I can give him the
answer to his question, there are many steps that need to be taken
for that answer to make sense. He needs to understand what a mode is,
what specifically `the Mixolydian mode is and that it is in fact the
same as G major but seen from a different point. Without these “in
between” steps, the answer makes no sense – it just demonstrates
me teacher, me clever, you student, you foolish, which is
absolutely not the point of a lesson in any way. If the
student leaves frustrated and more in the dark than when he or she
arrived, the teacher has failed.
The
problem that the DIY student faces is that most articles he or she
will encounter – be they in magazines, books, online etc – tend
to assume a basic level of knowledge which is not always there, and
trying to decipher and make sense of this information without a
framework to understand it in is incredibly difficult and
frustrating. It's akin to trying to learn a language just from a
phrasebook. It's no wonder I have many students who come to me having
learned solely from internet tabs, who have then plateaud out and are
unable to make progress because they didn't understand what they were
doing in the first place. That's when I have to break it all down and
rebuild their understanding and technique so they can keep
progressing and reach their goals.
I
know these problems and I understand them all too well because I was
exactly that student, teaching myself from the odd book and early
issue of Total Guitar magazine – and arriving it music college with
a patchwork, disconnected understanding of what I was doing. It took
my guitar teacher (the mighty Brian Thomson, Leicester's Yoda of the
guitar) pulling everything apart and going from the ground up for me
to have my Eureka! Moments and realise ohhh,
riiiiiiighhhtt.... that's how it all fits together.
And
the great thing is, it's way more simple than you think it's going to
be. Forget the silly jargon, the ridiculous overblown Greek and
Italian words we've appropriated to make ourselves look clever, and
let your teacher take you through from first principles, because when
you understand the framework the darkness evaporates and it's all
just so damn obvious.
So,
teacher vs DIY – yes, a teacher is more expensive than a magazine.
But a teacher – a good one - ensures understanding. And with that
understanding, the student has the tools to go and achieve anything
they want. The basic tenets of my program – and the Zero Point
series of books – are ensuring that my students (regardless of
style interest) have the chops and understanding to hear a song,
identify the chord pattern and play it in any key, all over the
fretboard, and improvise an appropriate solo or lead part. With this
understanding, pretty much anything becomes attainable. A student
doesn't come to me to learn a song. They come to me to learn how to
learn any song for themselves.
