My Mom just volunteered me to give lessons to the boy across the street. He has an acoustic guitar and he's interested in learning to play it. I've never met him before, he's about my age, and he and his family are from Russia. I have absolutely no idea what kind of music he likes.

The only person I've even attempted to give lessons to is my little brother. I got him started and he can play chords now, but I know exactly what kind of music he likes because we listen to the same people. And even though he was an absolute beginner when I started teaching him, I knew what to expect and what he'd like doing and what he wanted to do. With this other guy I have no clue.

What would be some good things to teach on a first lesson for an absolute beginner? Does what to teach differ depending on what style of music someone likes? I know when I started I wanted to play rock like U2, and my first teacher had me playing Elvis (I really don't like Elvis). So I lost interest for another year or so before I picked guitar back up and started teaching myself what I wanted to learn. I want to teach him to play something he likes to play. Hopefully I'll get lucky and his favorite band will someone I actually listen to, but if not what do I do?

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Wow Tall order there.

teaching guitar is not something to go into lightly.

What's expected of you, just to show him some stuff casually, or is this real lessons?

a couple things to read anyway:

http://www.musiccareers.net/career-arti ... ng-guitar/

I would suggest getting a method book, and helping him through it.

Find out what he likes, and set some long and short term goals around that. maybe make playing a basic version of a song one step along the way. Work through what he'll need to get there. Basic chords/strum patterns.

In almost every genre there are simple pieces that people love that can be an early goal.

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

I am sure that your mom is just trying to get the two of you to meet. Teach him the basics. Find out what he likes or wants to play. Go from there. Worst case scenerio is that the two of you do not click. You never know though, he may teach you some stuff in the process. Best of luck to the both of you.

RK

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RK

2007 Fender Highway 1
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2012 Marshall DSL 15 watt head

Hello TexasGuitarSlinger,

He may like "Song of the Volga Boatmen"

Have fun with it & best of luck.

Cheers.

Among the ideas above--teach him to tune it, if he doesn't already know that.

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It wasn't Willy-Nilly, it was at crows.

LMAO Comrade

Don't ask... TELL! You're the teacher. Heh... I'm not entirely serious, of course, but it's not all that likely that he'll offer up something that would make a good starting point. He may, though, and it's always good for a teacher to know what their student is hoping to get from the lessons.

It's been a l-o-n-g time since I taught, but here's what I often did to get things underway with a absolute beginner:

Show them E.

Show them A.

Show them D (optional!)

Get them to take the A with one finger flat across the three strings... doesn't really matter which finger at this stage.

Make them practice switching from E to A and back by flattening out that finger. Getting that move from the tips of the fingers (with a nice easy E) to a half barre (but not a tough one requiring much precision -- A) will help greatly with co-ordination.

Show them Jean Genie (David Bowie song, you may have to look it up, but it's a dead simple vamp in E).

While it may seem self-evidently straightforward to you, it will get your student's rhythm playing and chording off to a good start. Basically it's three downstrokes on the E, an upstroke on the open G,B and E strings, down on the A major chord and then up on the open strings again.

Listen to it and you'll get it immediately... I know that lengthy explanations with no pictures are horrible!

The thing is, it's at least something that any human will recognise as being the type of good-time music people like to play on a guitar, and he will feel great once he "gets it". And when he does, you can play some blues licks in E over the top -- fun for you, and he gets to see what's in store.

After that... show him the optional D chord I mentioned earlier and get into a blues shuffle in A. Because whatever music he may turn out to like, he needs to understand 12-bar blues... Not negotiable!

I'm supposed to teach him until he decides whether he wants to continue or not. Which is much scarier than if I knew he was totally determined to learn. It's hard to teach anyone anything unless they want to do it. I love playing guitar so much, I'd be very sad if I was responsible for turning him off to it or if he wanted to quit. If he wants to continue, I know several good guitar teachers who teach various styles that I will happily send him off to learn from.

His Dad is very... old school. They're from Russia, and they're more strict about learning stuff over there I guess. I had a classical flute teacher from Russia when I was in Jr. High. She was very nice, but it was down to business when the lesson started. I used to do fencing as my sport (money's been tight, so I had to give it up) and once this guy and his Dad came to check it out. They walked out shortly after because they saw the beginners fighting with swords on their first day. He said that when he fenced in Russia they didn't let them touch a sword until an entire year of just doing footwork.

So it could be that his Dad wants him to play something more sophisticated than CCR. Or maybe the Dad is forcing his kid to get into guitar? Classical maybe? I don't know.


Mr Bill, I can't read music.

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Cool, that's exactly what I had my little brother do. I guess I was on the right track.


I have that song, it came on the same CD with Let's Dance and China Girl. Come to think of it I haven't even listened to the whole CD yet, just fast forward to the solo, rewind and repeat.
I'll work it out tomorrow, but just from listening to it I think that would be a great beginner song for him to learn.


Absolutely! There are several songs I can think of that would be good for that.

One of the things I'm also going to try to do is teach him how to teach himself. Even now that I have guitar lessons, I still learn huge amounts of things from watching and listening to people other than my guitar teacher. The kids that go to lessons and never learn anything but what their teachers tell them aren't going to get anywhere by doing that.

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The fact that you're concerned enough about this kid's possible future development as a musician to post this topic says it all, really: Born teacher!

And don't worry about the old "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach" adage if anyone should be foolish enough to bring it up... All it will mean for you is that one day when people ask you how you got to be so good, you'll be willing and able to break it down for them. A great attribute.

Thanks.

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Make him a blues fan girl!!!! Mike

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The blues ain't nothin but a good man feelin bad.

Smoke on water and seven nation army. Everyone learns them.

Then just move on up threw stairway to heaven, but id be careful with that one, ive been thrown out of three music shops in my time for playing that....

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"Oh, it's a windy and sunny day
And I can hear the faint sound of distant waves
The past weeks have been going by so fast
It's all the same, the bright sky and shining sun
I have a feeling it's gonna be a fun day"

Hmm that reminded me of a couple of things from when I taught. I had two students that were brothers, and one day their mother told they liked taking guitar lessons from me better than the piano teacher they used to have. I felt pretty good about that--and then I found out the piano teacher was from before the emigrated from Iran, not after. So I am more fun and enjoyable than an Iranian piano teacher--whatever that's worth.

Also, while I didn't have any parents from Russia, I had many who were very traditional in their former country's culture (Various nations) so they had different expectations than their children did, that caused some friction at times.

It may not have been helped by my long shaggy hair, and sometimes I had facial hair. I would joke that was so I wasn't mistaken for a piano teacher.

At the end of the day there's part of what you do that needs to please the parent if there's money involved, but primarily I took my responsibility to be towards the student. If you ever take on paid students, and their parents are paying-be firm in the stance that the lessons are for the student, not the parents--their child should be taking lessons because they want to.

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It wasn't Willy-Nilly, it was at crows.

Yeah, if they're used to traditional Russian music (which I assume would mean classical), then they might be in for a little surprise when they hear some traditional Texas music... In the unlikely event that he's interested in more than just hearing me wank, I might even let him borrow my SRV DVDs... Maybe. But there's no way you can watch that and not like it.

And I do know some very basic classical guitar, and I know of a very good person to teach it in case that is what he likes. But if it's just his parents that want him to do that, then I'm going to focus more on how he can teach himself, so he can play what he wants, too. Sorry if I'm thinking out loud...

And I'll be sure to teach him Smoke on the Water in the right key. My first song was Smoke on the Water in the key my Dad thought it was in.

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