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two octave dorian mode on guitar
The dorian mode on guitar (much loved of fusion players everywhere) is nothing more than a natural minor scale with a raised 6th or the notes of a major scale running from the second note to the 9th. If you would like to go to my guitar teacher’s website to print a free handout featuring a two octave fingering for the dorian mode on guitar then please go ahead?
Feel free to use it in your teaching (or learning)?
A video that I put up on youtube. It explains chord shapes for children that will prevent them from having to stretch too far during the early stages of playing. Although there are lods of these three and four note shapes I have found that I only really feel comfortable teaching three of them (G Em and C). This is because that (hopefully) after a few weeks of study a teacher is obliged to teach the “full” shapes and students have to “unlearn” the “cheaters” versions? This can be confusing.
You can download some free stuff (chordsheets etc) from my site at teachwombat.com
“Hey! lets make a video for our thingy that we make to hang guitars up with?
What could we do to demonstrate the effects of gravity on carelessly placed instruments?
Let’s share this funny cigarette and see what we can come up with………………….? Ah yes I know! What if we…………..
Actually it looks like quite a neat product if you don’t want your guitars to be visible (personally I want the buggers where I can see them – they cost enough, but I’ve also lived in areas where people will steal the empty tins from your bin so I suppose I can appreciate why you might not want them on display?).
Anyway back to the video ………… at about twenty seconds into it someone sucessfully knocks a guitar flying with a (what I will be the first to concede is a very accurately flung but nonetheless bemused looking) cat! I suppose that in reality there are way worse things going on (probably within yards of where you live so lets not over-react here?) but the “strangeness” of it made me laugh (despite myself) .
No guitars were hurt during the making of this video.
I wonder if it was a trained professional stunt cat? The word on the industry grapevine is that in the “Directors Cut” of this advert they throw the little girl as well?
I bet it was a bit tricky trying to get a taxi driver to take her home?
We live in an age of relentless self promotion. there seems to be no limits to what people will do rather than get a proper job? Lady Gaga has just drawn attention to her latest pop warblings by being all over the telly in a frock made out of raw meat (bet you Ted Nugent is kicking himself?). Set in this context sticking what I admit is little more than an advert for my guitar teacher’s resources website teachwombat.com on my own blog seems to be the very model of restraint?
The video looks at how teachers can use a single backing track right through the ability range from total novice to advanced “pickers” (I hate that word!)
If this does not get me enough attention I intend to re-make the video wearing a waistcoat made from peeled (but not dead) mice.
I must go now as my medication is either kicking in or wearing off?
A bit stuck for time as if I don’t assemble the flatpack furniture that has begun to grow cobwebs I’ll be “severely dealt with”
Giant Guitar Chord Grids and a Normal Sized Guitar Neck (you get the idea?)
Giant Chord Grids. Guitar teacher’s can laminate them and use them in lessons. Guitar students can stick them on their bedroom walls and use them for practice without getting off the bed?
I’ll be adding more text to this post when I’ve made enough of an attempt at my chores to (hopefully) avoid discipline (it’s just not my thing!) but in the meantime if you’d like to mosey on over to my other site teachwombat.com (the one that tries to flog you stuff but which has loads of freebies on it?) there are a whole heap of free ones to download and print now.
GRRRRRRR!
If I ate a biscuit every time a musician told me that they didn’t have the patience required to teach guitar my belly would have it’s own wheelbarrow and would get in the room ten minutes before my face!
TEACHING GUITAR REQUIRES NO PATIENCE WHATSOEVER!
Learning to play the guitar takes a little patience but teaching it requres only understanding. Understanding and patience are two completely different things.
I have (next to) no patience (ask my wife?). I won’t even queue for beer and I like beer (again ask my wife?). If we decide that we need a sofa I refuse to entertain the notion that the guy in the furniture shop has to drum up a special order from a factory on the other side of the world and that once nailed together my stuff must be thrown onto a ship and dragged halfway around the planet before I can sit and drink beer on it (did I mention that I like beer?). I want the one in the window and I want it delivered tomorrow and If I can’t have it I’ll go to the shop next door.
Patience in my book is not a virtue, it’s a way of justifying inactivity. So how come I make a living teaching people to play the guitar, an activity that most people think requires industrial quantities of patience?
It is understandable (and desirable) for a guitar player to be impatient to get better. It is a disaster if the teacher shares this impatience.
If you spend an entire lesson willing your student to be able to play the thing that you have just shown them then you (and they) will achieve nothing. Watching someone elses fingers while they try to play music that is (at the moment) beyond them and investing emotion into it will hurl you headlong into an early grave. Staring bug eyed at someone elses fingers trying to do things that they are not capable of doing because they have not yet had the time to work on it will lead to you to a life of wearing odd socks, weeping uncontrollably and shouting at traffic! Okay maybe I’m laying it on with a trowel here but you get the picture?
The point of a guitar lesson is not that the student goes away from it able to play something that they could not when they walked into the room an hour earlier. The objective is that they go away with something to practice which will mean that they are better when they next walk into the room. Understand that and you will see that (for the teacher anyway) patience plays no part in the process.
If students find everything that you show them easy don’t kid youself that it’s because you are a fantastic guitar teacher. Your guitar teaching most probably (to use the modern vernacular) sucks? Why should somebody pay you to show them things that they can do already (they have all of the internet tab monkeys for that)?
If however, they go away with a few things to work on that they understand and can almost play then you are doing it right. If they then return able to play those things then they are doing it right (remember that teaching is about learning and that the most important role in the process is that of the learner and not that of the teacher).
The job of teaching guitar is largely about three things
If you spend an hour paying attention to those three areas you won’t need to watch them practice (I love teaching guitar but I refuse to waste my life and other peoples money watching someone practice it -once they understand what they need to practice by themselves it’s time to move on).
Guitar students do not pay us for our patience they pay us for a plan. I’m off to the sofa (possibly via the fridge?)
back to square one?
To ensure a sense of empathy with your pupils it is important for anyone who teaches to be able to see the situation from the point of view of the student and unless you’re some kind of ambidextrous circus freak this simple excercise will position you firmly back at square one?
In order to feel like a complete beginner again all you need to do is to flip the guitar over! If you normally strum with the right hand and fret with the left just spend a little time trying to form chords with the right hand while striking the strings with the plectrum in your left. Instant incompetence without the aid of alcohol!
It can also be an effective strategy during a lesson to help an intermediate player who may be a little frustrated with their progress to date realise how far they have travelled from the time that they first started to play by just turning the guitar over?
Not vey high tech I know but it works for me?
The chords of C A Am G E Em D and Dm
It’s as simple as that really. I work on the presumption that when people decide to learn to play the guitar they get a buzz out of being able to play things that they recognise and like as quickly as possible? In the early stages this can be acheived by getting to a situation where they can change between a bunch of the easiest chords to hold down (note there is no F chord on the sheet!).
generally regarded as the easiest chords for a novice to play
Some people prefer to teach them what the notes of the open strings are called or what the various parts of a guitar do but my feeling is that a novice really needs to do three things
(oops! that’s four things)
There are literally thousands of songs (or recognisable fragments of songs?) that can be played using the chords on the sheet in the photo.
You can download and print the free student handout with the chords on it shown above from my “other” site at http://teachwombat.com
I also have an article up there on a great site called “ultimate guitar” that looks at the process of giving a first lesson in much greater detail and here’s a link to it if you feel like reading further?
The first few of months of a beginner guitarist’s career could (and maybe should?) be largely taken up with becoming firstly aware of, and then familiar with the chords that make up the caged system (the chords of C A Am G E Em D and Dm mentioned above)
Some of the CAGED chords work particularly well in the key of G and by becoming familiar with just four of them (G Em C and D) a novice guitarist can develop an extensive and varied repertoire of stuff to practice and play.
examples include
“His latest Flame” G to Em
“Itchycoo Park” G to Em (Chorus)
“The Locomotion” G to Em (verse:1 bar each chord)
“Shout” G to Em
“Hallelujah” G to Em (ok I know its Em7 but it still works?)
“You Really Got A Hold On Me” (G to Em)
“Stand By Me” (All four chords in the order presented)
“Every Breath You Take” (All four chords in the order presented)
“Simply The Best” (ditto)
“Blue Moon” (ditto)
“Crocodile Rock (ditto)
“Hungry Heart” (and again?)
This list is really just intended to help the student to realise that they are capable of making reasonably rapid progress. Some of the songs detailed above are not in the original keys of the recorded versions and there are occasionally some simplifications going on there but the idea is to encourage the student to believe that they will get better with a little work.?
I’ll soon be blogging about guitar teaching tricks and tips and I suppose I’d better get the disclaimer in first?
They are not designed to work for every guitar teacher in every situation. They are just things that (sometimes) work for me and might (sometimes) work for you?
Every teacher is different. Every student is different and every lesson is different. There is an old saying that “you can never step into the same river twice” and while you need to have a plan it is important to be able to adapt (or even abandon) it should the occasion demand or the opportunity present itself.
You may find that a student needs to go back over some old ground that you thought they were comfortable with or it could be that you discover that they are more competent with regard to theoretical knowledge or technical ability than you expected at the start of the session.
The list of potential variables that exist at the beginning of any lesson means that it is almost inevitable that the experience that you deliver to your student will not be quite the same as the one that you thought that you would be providing at the start of the session?
For me, the key to teaching guitar is to work out the answer to the question “what is the best thing you can do for this person’s musicianship within the next hour”?
A guitar and a chord shape. Just about sums the whole thing up really?
How did you get to be a guitar teacher then (I imagine) I hear you ask?
Well……… I’d love to pretend that there always lay within me a deep and abiding passion to educate. A burning desire to light the way for other musicians setting out on the same journey that I took only a few short years before but the truth is that I started teaching guitar because I wanted money to buy beer with.
There I was fresh out of music college and cohabiting with a woman who seemed to be of the opinion that she was not about to go to work in an office all day to see her hard earned wages poured down the throat of a workshy toad who spent all day sat round in his underpants picking his nose and watching daytime television.
Not content to bask in the reflected glory that came from living under the same roof and breathing the same (admittedly stale) air as the man destined to rewrite the rules of popular music, she seemed strangely taken by the notion that the security of my status as a cohabitee (with associated rights and privileges) was somehow dependant upon my ability to contribute meaningfully to the household budget.
As an act of finely crafted revenge , I married her
