If,
like me, you’ve gone for the ‘safe & steady’ option of propping up a
majority of your performance career with a guaranteed base-income of
primary/secondary school guitar teaching, and, like me, find yourself wishing
one of your pupils would just put you out of your misery and club you to death
with their guitar, fret not... [guitar joke there…] (FYI I love this job really!!)
It is clear that the children of today are very much busier with extra
curricular activities than they were not even 15 years ago. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, to lessen the impact this multitude of activities might cause to your pupils' guitar playing abilities, here is a blog entry with some tips I have acquired along
the way to help streamline and encourage your pupils’ rate of learning. n.B. this is not an
entry about guitar methods, I’ll save that for another post!
1. Highlighters
Highlighters
are not only a great way of visually enticing a child to actually get their
guitar out and practice their piece, it is also an effective way of bringing
out and visually displaying some of the basic ideas hidden within the dots on
the page – for example voicing, dynamics, tone changes, and certain technically
demanding bars that the child really needs to practice in isolation.
When I first started getting into using these part of me thought this is really just graffiti – but the net result has been an observable speeding up in all of my pupils’ learning, hence I’m not going to stop it any time soon!
When I first started getting into using these part of me thought this is really just graffiti – but the net result has been an observable speeding up in all of my pupils’ learning, hence I’m not going to stop it any time soon!
2. The Gitano
I
avoid, where possible, making my pupils buy anything unnecessary, since bringing
up a child is itself an extremely expensive undertaking for parents. However,
if they are going to go down the route of getting their children to learn the
guitar this is a must-have accessory for their child’s initial technical and
postural development, as well as later musical development.
EUREKA!
You know that thing a lot of guitar pupils do with their thumb sticking out over the top?
That’s because when they practice at home they can’t be bothered getting their
footstool out to sit with correct posture – it’s a great way of spotting
who your lazy/inattentive students are! Instead, they put it on their left or right leg which makes having the thumb hanging over the top a
more comfortable approach to the fret hand, even if it is more restricting… Try
it! Sit with the guitar on your left leg (/right leg for the lefties) and relax
your posture; suddenly placing your fret hand thumb behind the neck requires
you to drop your shoulder to reach it. The effect is the same when sitting with the guitar on the right leg, but with the disadvantage of having a slightly twisted lower back.
So,
the Gitano streamlines practice - having one attached to the underside of the
guitar will mean there will be one less thing to do during the act of getting
the guitar out to practice, since it can stay attached to the guitar whilst in the guitar case. There are other such postural supports such as the Ergoplay Rest or the Dynarette support Cushion but they have to be detached and so create the same problem the footstool has with the lazy/inattentive students. To repeat, having one of these will mean that your pupil
will be 99.9% more likely to practice with correct posture and, hence, correct
technique! Not only that, but they will benefit from their lower back not being
damaged over time by the twisting caused as a result of sitting with one leg
raised on a footstool, or from sitting with the guitar on the right leg.
3. iPhone Notes
This
is something I wish I had brought in a long time ago! Alongside a scales/pieces-based
syllabus (I hope) you’ll most likely be setting extra exercises to develop particular
aspects of your pupils’ technique. I often used to find myself in the position
where I was unsure whether or not I had given a pupil a particular exercise
from a method book or group of my own composed exercises, as you can’t
necessarily work through them in page-order. (I like to set exercises which
relate to technical demands of a set piece)
Noting
down in short hand what you will cover/ended up covering with a pupil in a
lesson from week to week is useful, but still doesn’t keep a tab on what
additional exercises you have covered. Having a separate list beneath your
pupil’s profile will allow you to add each page separately and can be a ‘go-to’
list to see what exercises you have not yet covered. It also means if your
pupil didn’t practice this week through sheer laziness, you can punish them by
setting last week’s lesson’s to-do list and spending a chunk of their lesson
working through a random exercise they haven’t covered yet.
Hazzah! That’ll learn em!
Hazzah! That’ll learn em!
4. Easy-to-read Duos
Occasionally
when one of your pupils arrives to their lesson they might have just returned
from a particularly busy week, had a family matter that has caused them some
kind of distress, or just for some reason they’re in a bad mood (teenagers...).
Either way, they’ve not picked up their guitar all week to practice, but in
this instance its not an appropriate situation to be disciplining them for lack
of practice. I like to think of the lesson in this instance as a ‘therapy’
session for them to be coaxed into a happier frame of mind where they will be
enthusiastic to crack on with practice when they get home. A useful tool that I
know many great teachers already employ (after spending around the first 5 minutes
getting them warmed up and quickly refreshing their memory about last lesson's
set tasks and ‘re-setting’ them) is kicking back and enjoying playing through a
couple of duos with them. My current personal favourite tool for this is Trinity Guildhall's book of duo pieces. [Incidentally, if you can recommend any other duo books that you have had good experiences with please comment on this blog]. Duos are a great way of boosting sight-reading proficiency
in a slightly less formal, less intimidating, but more accessible way whilst
also giving your pupil access to more recognisable repertoire that would otherwise be
too advanced for them if set as a solo piece. If you can maintain their
enthusiasm for practice in this instance then you're doing a good job.
-DZ
Declan
Zapala is a contemporary/classical guitarist based in Watford, UK.
