Why Guitar Method Books Are Weak part 3

In a couple of previous posts I stated some reasons why guitar method books are much weaker than methods for other instruments.

This time I'll talk a little bit about what I use and why I think it is more effective.

I basically use what I call the First Division Guitar Method. I've taken some old First Division Band Method books that my band director wasn't using anyway and use them to teach guitar. I use the Eb Alto Sax books because they transpose to C/G which are very guitar-friendly keys.

(Mine don't really look as nice as this pic. I've got the really old ones.)

With this method, we begin by learning D, C and B on the second string with whole notes. When we add the note E on the third page we've now got a great list of beginner songs that the student will immediately recognize. Also, the student is only playing two fretted notes. They can then play Mary's Little Lamb, Au Claire De Lune and Hot Cross Buns.

The main difference, however, is the pace. I really think that the technique required to play the guitar well requires this kind of slower pace. Since it is a beginner band book, it's designed to teach one hundred or more 6th graders to play many different instruments all at the same time. The first two pages are dedicated to learning just those first three notes. They begin with whole notes and add quarter notes on the second page.

To keep things from moving too slowly they mix in several pieces with Solo/Class options and two line duets. These are really good if you have a large class and want to evaluate what each student is doing. You just get different kids to play the solo. We also do a lot of "Boys play # 5 and girls play #6" on the duet lines. I can walk around and see what each person is doing.

They also don't get as bored with the repetition required because the Solo adds interest and they want to see how others are doing. It also provides a great incentive for them to work harder since they know that they may be next.

For the rest of the book they add one or two notes at a time and have a lot of repetition. Also, after they introduce new notes they emphasize them for a couple of tunes and then go back and focus on those few core notes. The emphasis really seems to be on learning to read well rather than just learning "all the notes". The "real" guitar methods out there really seem to be about getting all the notes learned as fast as possible.

Any other band method would probably work just as well. I just happened to have old first division books here. But they're all designed to teach large groups of students at a reasonable pace. (Just remember that the Eb instruments are already transposed to guitar-friendly keys.) I think that this offers a great starting point for thinking about a new way to teach guitar.

Anyone who has ever played or taught Piano out of the Thompson books knows what a vast improvement the Bastian series is for beginning learners and so on with newer methods. For guitar instruction not only do we not have a "Bastien" type method, we don't even have a "Thompson". I really think that we are light years behind other instruments in the area of beginner instruction in note-reading.

I think that the main reason for this is that the guitar is generally taught by "strummers" like me. Learning to read notation is just kind of an afterthought. However, the stereotype that guitar players can't read music may not only be about players and teachers' interest and attitudes about reading music. It may also have something to do with the way we teach it.