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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

GAMA Teaching Guitar Workshop: Day 5 and Workshop Review

Friday morning we were all getting ready to leave. I know that everyone had at least one extra load to carry with them because of all the stuff that we got. A few people in our group were flying or driving to other destinations and had to have their stuff shipped. But what a great problem! Thanks again GAMA members for the donations.

We had a morning session where we worked the barre-chords some more. "Sittin on the Dock of the Bay" I think and some other things that I don't remember because I didn't have my notebook. it was packed up already.


We went over to Spivey Hall and performed our ensembles with our groups. It was really nice. The Spivey hall folks set up the stage for us between groups and dimmed the lights when a group left the stage. It made you feel like a pro. It was a lot of fun. My group, "Kathy and the Boys" performed "Some Kind of Sunset (Tango)" and "St. Joshua Infirmary" from the H.O.T. and Jerry Snyder ensemble books. Actually, "St. Joshua" was a medley of our own making because we liked "Joshua Fit the Battle" and "St. James Infirmary" so much.

Afterwords we took the workshop photo on the Spivey Hall staircase with our guitars and headed back to our classroom one last time. We packed up our stuff and wrote thank you letters to GAMA and to a manufacturer. I wrote my manufacturer letter to the company that makes Aurora strings. They're multi-colored. Your female students will think they're really pretty and I think that they have a lot of potential as an instructional aid for beginners.

Overall, I thought that the workshop was fantastic. I've played the guitar for 20 years, taught private lessons for 15 and taught classroom guitar for 3 and I still had plenty to learn. Teaching guitar in the classroom setting is just a different beast. It was great to have a week of just seeing what others are doing.

If you teach a guitar class already I think you'd get a lot out of this workshop if only to preview and play through all the guitar books we received. If you don't play guitar yet but would like to teach it in your classroom, then this class is especially geared toward you. A large portion of the workshop is focused on getting inexperienced teachers some guitar skills.

I never found much on the web about the workshops except for their site. So, I tried to be pretty thorough with my review. If you have any questions about the workshop feel free to comment below and I'll try to get back to you.

Suzanne, who is the workshop chair, said they're working on revamping the website. It's linked here. They are also forming groups on facebook and myspace.

In my future posts I'll review some of the books we got at the workshop.

Gama Guitar Workshop Day 2, 3 & 4

On Tuesday we arrived and there was a stack of 4x4's cut into 8" sections. These were our footstools. It wasn't really high enough for me but it gives you a good idea as to what you can do with some homemade foot stools. Suzanne told me she usually does them in 3 different heights. She takes 2x4's and cuts them into 8" sections. Then she screws two of them together for some and three together for others. She then has 4, 6 and 8 inch footstools because the stacks of 3 can be turned on their sides to give you the 8 inch height.

Suzanne also overheard Thad and me playing jazz in our dorm room Monday night and asked if we could play for the group. Thad called it jamming. I called it a lesson from Thad. I have never actually played jazz in front of anyone. We set that up for Thursday around lunch time.

During our afternoon break-out session with the high-school people we talk some more room set-up. Hand sanitizer is necessary for kids using school instruments. One of the guys mentions that Finger Ease is good for "acid hands'.

We do more methods stuff with Suzanne on rhythm strumming. We start with the Left Hand muting and working on "missing" strums to create different rhythms. Jim introduces new chords. (He calls D7 "Dog Seven" to not confuse it with E7 when he says it over students' playing.)

He introduces the idea of "divide and conquer". Some of us are having trouble changing chords. So he divides us up into 2 or 3 groups. "You guys make sure you cover this chord every time. If you can get some of the others great, but make sure you're covering this chord". We learn that "guides slide".

We work power chords, root-5th bass patterns, pima, rest strokes and free strokes. Suzanne introduces Travis picking and teaches us "Dust in the Wind". We work E-form and A-form barre chords and learn the "Chaconne" (Am G F E).

After class we all went to Guitar Center because a
lot of the folks in the class had never been to a guitar store. Then we went to Maple Street Guitars, the place to go if you're ever in Atlanta. They're much smaller but have a lot of great guitars and sheet music. We finished up Wednesday with a meal at California Pizza at the mall in town. I ordered the Jamaican Jerk pizza. Good Stuff!

I got to meet my dad for lunch on Thursday. Then Thad and I played Autumn Leaves, Black Orpheus and Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughn in Spivey Hall for our group. We also had Mike, a Jazz woodwind instructor from a college in NC play tenor sax and flute with us. His wife was in Atlanta taking the class with us. Both of these guys are pros and I was glad to get to play with them.

In the afternoons Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we worked on our ensembles. We were preparing for a Friday mini-concert in Spivey Hall, a very nice concert hall at Clayton State. The groups were supposed to be of mixed ability levels and our was pretty well balanced. I had Gene and Kathy in my group. Kathy had a good bit of experience growing up with guitar but had not played in a while. Gene was pretty new to the guitar.

I'll try to close out the week in my next post.

Monday, July 27, 2009

GAMA Workshop Day 1 continued

Day 1 consisted of our getting a 1-foot high stack of books and being asked to choose a guitar to try out. They told us that the guitar raffle would happen at the end of the day and at each break we would put back the guitar we had been using and choose another. By the end of the day we had used 5 or 6 different instruments. Then we each took a number and when our number was called we got the pick of the guitars that were left. All of them were nice instruments.

There were four or five sessions each day, and for each session, we played through lessons in several books. The taught us in the same way that they would teach beginning students and many of the teachers were beginners. A portion of every segment was aimed at working on the guitar skills of the workshop participants, but it was still great to see other people's methods for introducing things and the kind of terminology they used to teach.

There was a little bit of time when others were practicing their skills and those of us that were already players had to find something to do. There was one participant who has a couple of studios full of students in private guitar lessons back home. He was the real player. Then there was me and a band director who played pretty well already. There were others who had varying degrees of experience in playing. Overall, I was very pleased with the methods content and my fears that most of the workshop would involve teacher's skills on guitar were unfounded.

Later in the week, Suzanne told a great story of a workshop participant who was a professional classical player who brought a left-handed guitar and learned to play that way to avoid being bored and learn from a beginner's point of view. Now why didn't I think of that? She said he also performed with his ensemble right-handed-upside-down. I generally tried to save these times for questions I had wanted to ask about the instructors' programs or how they approached particular problems. I also played some chord melody, combined parts, played in higher positions and improvised. This was encouraged by the instructors and was a lot of fun.

On Monday Jim gave us a segment introducing chords. Jim's predominating phrase in this segment was "keep strumming". This quickly became the recurring joke during the week, but it really is genius. He would say things like, "I'm going to move my fingers down a string, but I want you to just watch while you stay on the chord your on now. ....and your going to do what? That's right. Keep strumming!"

This seemed crazy at first but, then I started thinking about how much time I spend saying, "Put your guitar in resting position.", "Your hands should not be on the strings while I'm talking" and similar phrases that I use while I'm talking. Maybe one way to to deal with kids not stopping is to have them not stop as often. He might have something there. Jim kept talking and we kept strumming as we learned new chords. Hmmm!?!


I was also very interested in Jim's philosophy for introducing groups of chords. He groups chords by fingering similarities rather than by key. He teaches Em first; then Am and E because they have what the H.O.T. (Hands-On Training) books call "EZ movers; fingers that easily move from one chord to the next. Then he teaches the easy move from Am to C; then Am to D7; from D7 to G and so on.

H.O.T. books at Amazon

All the while he's using the "bun" technique. Begin with an easy chord, introduce something new and back to the easy one again. (The meat is the new material you want to introduce.) Cool.

We had sessions with Suzanne on playing 'bass' where we played along with popular songs on CD's using notes on the 5th and 6th strings. These are fun for students and introduce notes on these strings that will later be used for power chords and barre chords. We also introduced note-reading and improvisation. Suzanne taught a blues segment and explained why she prefers using closed position minor pentatonics because A-blues shuffle patterns and chords are easier to play and because the improv pattern is movable. She also stated that she thinks not having open strings is somehow less confusing to younger students.

Then we had break-out sessions with elementary teachers going with Suzanne and High-Schoolers going with Jim. We talked curriculum, class-room set up, tuning guitars and other mundane but necessary things to know about in teaching large numbers of guitar students.

When I got back to my suite at the dorm in the evening I discovered that my buddy Thad from the workshop had moved into one of the rooms. This was the beginning of a week of jamming, as Thad is an excellent player in a variety of styles. He also is a private-lesson instructor with a ton of students. So we had plenty of great conversations about that end of things too.

In future posts I'll wrap up the week and try to do some reviews of the excellent classroom guitar books that we received.

GAMA Teaching Guitar Workshop: Arrival and Guitar Raffle

I've decided to post a day-by-day description of what we did because it was a week long and I think that will be the easiest way to get my head around it.

Sunday, I drove out to Atlanta from Oxford, MS right after Sunday morning services. On the way, I had to stop and change a fan belt that went out. I just happened to pull into a gas station across from an O'Reilley's Auto Parts store. After 45 minutes I was back on my way. The rest of the trip went smoothly.

In Atlanta I was set up in a nice suite at Clayton State University's new dorm. Very nice and $35.00/night. I had a whole suite to myself which I didn't really like because I like to go to things like this to meet people. When I went back to the room later, I found that I had acquired a new suite-mate. He is a monster guitar player and plays jazz really well so I got a lot of jam time with him during the week.

Day 1
Our class was to start at 8:30 and I arrived a few minutes early to check out the "stuff". I had heard that there was going to be a lot of material for us and that the guitars would be given out in a raffle. So I kind of scoped out what I wanted so I'd be ready when they called my number.

There was a wide variety of guitars from different manufacturers. Off the top of my head here's what I remember being available: There were 2 baby Taylors and two 2 baby Martins. All 4 had nice gig bags. There were three silver Fender acoustic-electrics with strat-style headstocks. I think these may have come with gig bags as well. There were entry-level Breedlove and Tacamine acoustic-electrics; one each, with a nice hard-shell case. There were 3 Aria steel-strings with nice hardshell cases, a yamaha nylon-string with hard case, an Ibanez electric with practice amp and a Hohner steel-string acoustic. I think the Hohner was the only one that didn't have any kind of case, but besides the babys (and maybe the Breedlove) it was the only one with a solid top.

A lot of very nice choices. My number came up late in the raffle. There was still a baby Martin and a couple of the Arias left but I decided to go with the electric because I've been borrowing my son's nappy old one for to long.

We met our instructors for the week, Suzanne Shull and Jim Yancy. (Sorry, Jim. I feel like I probably called you Tim a couple of times.) I thought it was interesting that both of them come from a choral background. It gave them a great perspective to teach from with an "anyone can learn to teach this" mentality. Jim was kind of interning and Suzanne has tought with the workshops pretty much from the beginning. Suzanne has taught guitar in the middle school setting for many years and now volunteers at a local school. Jim has built a successful program out in Phoenix that has outgrown his choirs, and has had a group perform at a national convention.

More to come...

Friday, July 24, 2009

GAMA Teaching Guitar Workshop Materials

Well, I said I would give an update on the Teaching Guitar workshop in Atlanta. I'm back and will post more later, but here's a quick look at the sample materials and gifts the manufacturers provided for us.



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