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.