Right Hand Technique for Middle School Guitar

I thought that it might be good to address the issue of right hand technique since it is something that I really struggled over at the beginning of the year.  I went to the GAMA workshop and was inspired by a couple of people who had gone beyond picking with thumbs and were doing finger alternation.  Of course this was on the high school level, but I really wanted to do something more than just using the thumb. 

I began with teaching alternating "I-M" rest strokes while we were learning the first string.  Then, we started the second string.  When we finally began approaching the point of putting them both together, I realized that I would have to deal with the issue of string-crossing.  If you've never played classical guitar, this has to do with avoiding awkward fingerings when going from the 1st string to the second and so forth.  The idea is to alternate so that you're not playing with the same finger on two consecutive notes. 

The problem is that sometimes in order to alternate you have to:

1. Make an awkward crossing to a higher string with the lower finger while moving the entire hand parrallel to the strings and try to keep the angle.
2. Incorportate the "A" finger and plan out string crossings ahead of time.

When I was in college, I learned a set of general principles for avoiding string crossings and wrote in the R.H. fingerings in tricky places using the "A" finger to avoid awkward "I-M" crossings.

I just really thought that this might be way to difficult for Middle School kids.  So, I emailed a few people I really respect in the field to ask what they would do on the Middle School level.  One was a friend of mine who is a professional and he recommended I talk to his buddy who works with Middle Schoolers out in Austin, TX.  They are the guys with the Austin Guitar Society who run the guitarcurriculum.com site.

I really like their philosophy of emphasizing technique and ensemble playing from the start.  I spent a couple of weeks looking pretty hard at their stuff and have incorporated some of the ideas, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the techniques don't fit with a traditional guitar method.  They've begun with the idea that the methods are the problem, and I whole-heartedly agree.  So they wrote their own curriculum from scratch. 

I just couldn't do a whole new curriculum a few weeks into the semester.  I think that if I'm still doing this in a couple of years, I'll probably be using this.  I would definitely like to do some of their training.  It's a very comprehensive but is definitely a "next level" concept for someone who wants to really train up players. 

I also talked to Bill Swick from Las Vegas Academy Guitar Program.  His is program is probably one of the most prestigious in the country and the entire county out there has a huge guitar program.  (Check out the GAMA video.)  He teaches high school but told me about the technique he used when he taught middle school. 

It involves simply assigning a finger to each string: A - 1st, M - 2nd, I - 3rd and P to 4, 5 and 6.  I thought this made a lot of sense and decided that it would be a good step in the right direction after thumb-picking for a couple of years.  I pulled a couple of pages from a classical book that involve playing open-string patterns and worked them with the kids for a week or so using the meticulous attention to technique suggested by the guitarcurriculum.com method. 

Then, we went back to our method book and played all of the 1st string notes with the A finger and all of the 2nd string notes with M.  Most kids grasped this pretty well, and we are using it with a good deal success to this point.  I do have to note that when you use this technique with a traditional method you begin with the 1st string which is the A finger.  This inherantly makes proper technique more difficult to reinforce. 

I've got the technique principles written on their rubric/grading sheets and consistently try to reinforce them, but I know that all of this would be easier if you could start with playing P, I and M on open strings the way the Austin guys do it.  You would just have to have a curriculum written to that goal.  Well, they do and again that's why I think that eventually I may go that direction. 

For now, the kids are using footstools, sitting in a healthy seated postion, and they're playing with PIMA using reasonable technique.  This is a great improvement from what we were doing a year ago and I think that it also gives us a lot more range in the difficulty of literature that they can perform without having to worry about string crossing.