Good Things Come in Threes
My two most recent students have been really good at learning the guitar skills that I have shown them. I began the tuition of my third new guitar student today. He is a fifteen year old male, who is about six feet tall with long fingers. He seems to be at the intermediate level of guitar playing even though he has only been playing for a few weeks and has never had a guitar lesson before. He demonstrated a quick ability to enact several primary exercises with the good guitar technique that I showed him today. He knows how to play a major scale and can even play the intro to “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns and Roses, which involves using the fourth finger of his left hand. His feel for the instrument is so good that I suspected that he had been given previous guitar training, but his grandmother confirmed that he had only been playing for a few weeks, learning whatever he could off of the internet. His parents encouraged him to learn guitar after he bought the popular computer game where you play air guitar; I do not know the name of that game. He may need someone to show him the chromatic lead guitar lines that these modern metal guitarist play. I do not know those scales and I doubt that the only other guitar teacher in town knows those scales either. (He is an older man than me.) I can teach him the six modes that he does not already know. I can teach him the concept of a one-four-five chord progression and some pentatonic scales with passing tones added to them. I can demonstrate how to learn a song by listening to it and I can give him hints on how to write a song that he hears in his head. I suspect, however, that this student will need training in areas that I am not skilled in and I hope that I can somehow direct him to someone who can give him the training that he needs.
Rock on,
I.C.