Guitar Tips - Educating The Guitarist
By: Phil Circle
The title of this article alone is a bit of an oxymoron:
educated guitarist. The joke in the music community goes
like this: How do you get a guitarist to stop playing? Put
music in front of him. As a kid I was trained in music from
an early age, mostly on piano and voice. Then, after begging
my Mom to buy me a guitar, I got into lessons at about the
age of 12. By the time I got to college, I could barely
read music anymore because the various guitar instructors
I had never taught any theory. In fact, I was largely dependant
on them for any knowledge of the instrument and had begun
to forsake lessons in favor of teaching myself. The problem
with that is you don’t really have much of a clue as to
what information is valuable without the guidance of a teacher.
You see the spot one ends up in with the standard approach
to guitar lessons and how the problem of the uneducated
guitarist perpetuates itself.
Once I got to college and started my degree in music, I
began lessons in classical guitar. Now, most people equate
classical guitar with classical music and immediately write
off this method since they don’t really desire to play classical
music. This is a mistake. First of all, classical guitar
refers more to the hundreds of years of tradition behind
playing the lute and guitar. For instance, tablature was
thrown out by traditional guitarists a hundred years ago
as being a less practical way of reading music for the guitar
than standard notation. Then back in the sixties, “modern”
guitarists got lazy and started using tab again.
Second, classical guitar music includes four hundred years
of songs from the Renaissance to modern day, spanning the
folk styles (popular styles from long ago) of many countries,
especially Spain, the generally agreed upon birthplace of
the guitar. Understanding an instrument means not working
with it based on musical styles—a uniquely American approach
to music—but understanding all the workings of technique
and theory as developed by centuries of trial and error
undertaken by countless virtuosos. Why anyone would throw
out so much of the work of the past masters in favor of
reinventing the wheel, a faulty one at that, is beyond me.
I find without fail that when I take on a new guitar student,
whether child or adult, beginner or advanced, they move
forward in their understanding of the guitar’s complex fretboard
theory and difficult-to-master technique through the classical
approach. I found this to be true for myself, too. For several
months a year, I throw myself headlong into furthering my
classical playing. This is always when I see the most improvement
at all levels. Countless students of mine have shown the
same. I am not a classical guitarist per se, and most of
my students are into contemporary styles as well, although
a few have gone on to study in Spain with my old teacher.
But, it remains the best approach to any instrument to take
the lead of the masters who have come before you to understand
the your instrument completely, thus taking all the mystery
out of it, so that you can explore the true mystery of music—the
creativity and expressive power of the musician himself.
For an easy to follow classical method book that will insure
you are site reading before the end of it and enjoying the
learning process through many performable pieces, try The
Christopher Parkening Classical Method, Volume One. If you
have a good time with this book and want to really grow,
follow it up with a book of Spanish classical pieces or
the works of Bach.
Guitar is a difficult instrument to master, one of the toughest
if approached with real mastery in mind. Leaving this mastery
to perceived shortcuts and ignoring basic understanding
dooms you to many deadends. No violinist walks into a lesson
and says, “I’d like to learn bluegrass,” and has the teacher
just go along with it. They take the initial education that
has evolved over generations as a given, building a foundation
from there. After mastering some basic skills and the application
of knowledge, they are then able to tackle any style they
like with confidence. Ruby Harris, one of the most outstanding
blues and jazz violinists, who also masters Irish, Klezmer
and Bluegrass, is a classically trained player. Nothing
is foreign to him. Guitarists could learn a lot from this.
Good luck and remember, no Stairway To Heaven.