The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

I have been teaching private guitar lessons for roughly three years in Austin. My school, The School of Feedback Guitar, is where I unabashedly offer every single person what I consider to be the best in guitar lessons in Austin. I call it Kick Ass Guitar Lessons. I don't mess around; I am secure in my ability to give really awesome guitar lessons.

There are many times that I wish there was more I knew about teaching guitar. If I did, then every problem that showed itself in my office would have a logical solution. But there are dynamics in teaching that no teacher has control over. Specifically, I have no control over how people learn.

I am always thankful that I am allowed the freedom to choose how I think, and not just what I think about. I am also thankful that for the past three years I have had the freedom to learn from correlations. "How did I make a client happy? Did this technique work?" I don't gather data neccesarily, but I keep a close watch on what works and what doesn't amongst all my clients. To this day, I keep on learning.

It's obvious, to me at least, that I don't have a good enough grasp of the way humans operate in order to help everyone learn guitar who wants to. There really is no magic wand, and there is no Matrix-style program that we can load up our brains with that automatically makes us viruosos (and thank goodness for that). The thing that I can do, and will continue to do, is arrange the information of learning guitar the best that I can, in a way that works for as many people as possible. I will tweak the information in order to present it a different way, like if someone needs me to be more visual. Above all, I'll always try to be supportive of anyone who is learning. I hope I am successful in that pursuit.

For all those who have studied with me thus far, thank you. I wasn't the teacher... You were.

Over the past month, I have noticed a diminished capacity to remain energetic in each lesson for each person. My heart began to sink at this realization. As a result, I took a closer look at the way I structured my lessons and found that changing my approach will benefit everyone. There are now be three main sections to each lesson. Since I was going to send this out to my regular students, I thought I may as well publish it. It will give you an idea of how I operate if you want to take lessons with me.

The Warm Up

All teachers must learn to maintain and manage dozens of professional relationships, one after another or in a big classroom, to be successful in their work. Each student is different, and if they plan upon reaching any number of them, both student and teacher must be on the same page. The Warm Up is intended to do this.

The Warm Up is conducted with as little chatter and with as much music as possible. This helps both of us center our attention on guitar, and not on anything else. The way I plan upon accomplishing this is to steer us to either play a song, play a rhythm, play something that you have totally mastered, or jam. Furthermore, this allows you to really allow a concept or song “get into” you. Mastery of concepts is far more dependent upon playing than it is practicing. The Warm Up allows you to play and just enjoy it. I believe it is critical and besides it just feels good to play music. After I feel we are centered and on the same page, it's time to review.

The Review

After we settle into the space, it's time to review the stuff we went over the previous week and collaborate on the process of mastery of this material. This is the best time to straiten out technical or musical issues about guitar, collaboratively.

I'm very serious about the word “collaboration.” I'm now convinced this is the best way to work through technical problems. It gets both of us involved in resolving issues that keep you from playing guitar. In short, two minds are better than one. I plan upon using both of our brains to make guitar easier for you.

The New Stuff

After settled and reviewed, it is time for the new stuff. If you are wondering why I wait until later in the lesson, this is why:

There have been times that I jumped directly into a new idea or concept, right from the start of a lesson. This not only disregarded what the student was working on previously, but it was a wasted energy when both of us were not settled into the lesson. It also did them a disservice because it didn't help them own the previous material, at all. I believe this to be a terrible waste of energy and an egregious waste of time. We both need to settle into our professional relationship and time together before anything can be accomplished, and we both need to collaborate on solving problems as well.

In Conclusion

Doing both The Warm Up and Review lays the foundation. It acts as a launch pad to learn new stuff and soak in what I have to show you, aka The New Stuff. This is all meant to help anyone get to the point with playing guitar, and help anyone continually build a far better ability. Once again, this is how I teach guitar.

What's the worst piece of advice you can receive from a guitar teacher, ever? "You must have the thumb directly behind the neck."

Why? Thumb length varies from person to person. Advising someone to put it directly behind the neck basically ignores how their wrist looks and how long their fingers are. The worst part is that the thumb position affects the wrist position. If the wrist is messed up, then say hello to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Nasty, and probably not in a good way.

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has everything to do with over-stressing the hand while it is in a horrible position. When the thumb is too high, then the wrist is cocked towards you. When the thumb is too low, the wrist is pushed away. Either way, a wrist that is bent unnaturally will have some problems later. The solution? Ignore everybody. Pay attention to the needs of your hand, and and place your thumb where it will keep your own wrist straight.

I needed to buy a hard drive at a locally owned computer store the other day. The person who was helping was extremely knowledgeable about computers. He knew his stuff inside and out. It was obvious that he thought about computers a lot. It was a perfect fit for him as he works in a highly regarded computer store. However there was something odd about the conversation. Although I got a lot of information all at once, there was no room for me to process what he was saying. It made me wonder. I heard a blur of technical details that I didn't necessarily need. All I needed was a hard drive and his recommendation.

There is something to keeping mum and playing the quiet game. Even if a client doesn't seem to be getting it, they are processing the information. In guitar, simply shutting up when a client's hands look good and while they are working on something allows them to master the work on their own.

I think I will humbly take this advice myself (I babble too much as it is). I also have mixed feelings regarding know-it-alls. I want to tell them, "Well, hello mister fancypants."

This is the challenge:

On my wall at the School of Feedback Guitar are liner notes to roughly 15 albums. Sometimes they have covers with the artist name, sometimes they don't. Many times, they have no words... just photographs. The first person who can identify every single album and artist of each liner note will get six months of free guitar lessons compliments of me and the School of Feedback Guitar. That, my friends, currently comes out to about $1200 worth of lessons from a guy that loves guitar and wants to see you kickass at it.

Rules:

1. You'll have four minutes to observe and look for clues before you guess.
2. You'll have unlimited number of times to observe each of the liner notes, but you get one time to look per visit.
3. Periodically, I will switch up the liner notes. This is just to keep the challenge interesting.
4. You may not take a picture of the liner notes or bring a flashlight to see the back. Cheaters might win in public school, but not private school.

I tend to have fairly eclectic listening tastes. There is pretty obscure stuff on there, but if you can do it then six months of free lessons from me.

Good luck!

As if it weren't already obvious, I like to think about guitar as well as teaching it. It's a little bit to do with the stuff like money or getting clients, and much to do with the actual relationship between teacher and student. The latter, for some reason, fascinates me.

I believe that any subject can be ultimately broken down into small manageable chunks, which I like to think of as "quick fixes." One thing however that quick fixes cannot change is helping a student play guitar who doesn't want to do it. To paraphrase a potent analogy, it's like putting ice cream on top of poop. There's no quick fix for someone who doesn't want to play.

I think that there are just thousands of fantastic ways to show people just about anything on guitar, if they want to do it. Teachers can unintentionally hurt a student's desire to play by asking for too much. Sometimes, teachers can sap the student's enthusiasm by asking for quantum leaps in development, overnight. Disgusing this by saying, "Well, you need to practice okay?" is just not cool. It creates a huge amount of stress for a student, one who might just be in it to have fun. It makes them not want to play guitar AND it makes them feel bad about it. If you are a guitar teacher, do you really want to do that to someone? If you were studying guitar again, would you want a teacher to do that to you? Is it fair?

Maybe this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Guitar teachers, educators, and performers are really easy to pick on. We make so many mistakes because we tend not to try so hard. My biggest (but most fun) mistake was signing up for Twitter. It broadcasts all of my spelling errors. I have heard hundreds of horror stories from people who I've helped play guitar. I've heard people say stuff like, "I bought this book, but it totally sucks. It's boring." Did the people who wrote those books ever stop to think that the content or it's delivery is neither appropriate or fun? Like I said, targets. We do it to ourselves.
 
There is only one way to teach appropriately, and that is to experiment and get better at it. Our job is not to immediately foist a Beatles song including the solo on a student who is on their first lesson. Our job is to make appropriate but fun ways to eventually help the person play that Beatles song. If you don't try hard enough, then it is easy to become a horror story, and bad news travels fast.

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As a side note, the story above about the Beatles song, solo and all, is a true story. Guitar teachers make easy targets. My Twitter moniker is @feedbackguitar

It's not often that we hear about a guitarist who developed their musicality and technical ability in complete solitary confinement. It is really difficult for someone to do this. This means that they heard a song and learned to play it all on their own, without internet lessons (let alone private lessons), tabs, outside influence, or anything else. It's also my opinion that few are able to learn guitar or music without thinking about performance from day one. We play for ourselves, our friends, teachers, colleagues, and even people we get drunk with (if you drink and play guitar). Performing makes people nervous, too. You can't just ask the audience to not look at you! It's part of the deal. You play, the audience watches.

A microcosm of this is the guitar lesson. You play, your teacher watches. It's obvious that the teacher can overtly distort and harm a student's ability to handle an audience, even if the audience is just one person. This can be the case much of the time with classical music education. I have to restrain myself when talking about how classical music teachers approach pedagogy; I can rant for hours. My view is that classical music has been taught primarily by human beings who are trying too hard to perform like perfect musical robots. I feel that many ignore the humanity of their student's playing so that they can "measure up" to "all the others." Imagine learning under this oppressive atmosphere! It's not fun! I did it learning viola, and I despised my teacher for it!*

For this reason (among others), it takes time for brand new students to trust teachers, especially music teachers. The idea that the teacher is sort of the emissary for the audience makes the student probably extra nervous. So how do we, as teachers, have more compassion for the people we are helping? In my own teaching work, I have erred on the side of giving my complete attention and kind eyes to each student who I'm working with. I give my attention to them with my eyes primarily. Until recently, I never thought that this might not be good for everyone. It may not build trust or technique as fast as I would want it to. It might make some people more nervous.

I am going to experiment with not looking (staring?) at students as they play for the next couple of weeks, and see if there are any results. I have a feeling that there are certain people who will thrive with this situation, and there are others who would prefer the eye contact. We'll see.

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*If you study classical music with someone who is human and is a great person, then make a point to keep your relationship with that person very strong. I feel strongly that Nick Goluses at the Eastman School of Music is one of the few teachers out there that actively cares about his students, and helps them develop both their humanity as well as their musicianship.

A very good friend of mine and I were talking about my little obsession with teaching guitar. I wondered out loud whether it was a good idea to blog about how to approach teaching. It sometimes requires a lot of energy, which could be spent on making a something else (like online guitar lessons?). My friend brought up a good point:

"Nobody blogs about teaching guitar because they are all trying to be rock-stars"

So a huge puzzle piece fell into just the right spot. Perhaps the reason why few people really blog about teaching guitar (or for that matter actually look at the way they are teaching it) is because, well, they are just doing it to pass the time and get some extra dough on their way to rock-stardom. Although I am not giving up on the dream, it is important for me to take teaching guitar very seriously for the time being. It's far more satisfying to look at a task and see I did it right. That's just my own way.

The following is not a judgment. There are teachers out there who want to be rock-and-roll stars, and be at the top. They want to be in front of 10,000 screaming fans, and there is no other place for them. Therefore they look at teaching as just another step on the way there. You can learn from them, like how to not be nervous in front of others.  Also, there are teachers out there who want to teach and support their students, primarily. They want them to learn and they want to see them do well. Therefore they might look at a career in performing as something they are not interested in. You can learn from them too if you want to gather and survey the guitar and not worry about performing so much.

The point is that either teacher can help you learn, but it is good to choose the one who fits your needs and wants the best.