The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

I really like teaching. There is something about it that is very challenging, very intensely interesting, and makes me look really hard at how I am doing at it. I wish I could put it into words better, but I never really imagined that I would end up being this fascinated with the process of education. It seems that whenever I get to that point where I feel like I have exhausted all my possibilities to explore, another possibility pops right up. Sometimes, that's a common assumption on the part of career teachers. "What is there that is left to know? I've got it all, including tenure." It would seem however that getting used to the process of letting go of assumptions (as a teacher or student) could mean breakthroughs in thought. That's the good stuff, and it's one of the many reasons I still love to learn something new to this day.

People who are learning guitar could do well by challenging their own assumptions too. After all, the process of learning guitar seems to be slightly hindered by them, and it does us good to explore what it looks like to let go of them. The assumptions below are ones that I have seen in people I have worked with over the years. One of the most fruitful parts of my work is that I get to watch these assumptions fall away over time, mostly because I tend to challenge them. I bet you never met a nerd who is willing pick a good fight, eh? Just don't hit me, I'm fragile.

Everyone must perform in order to learn guitar.

Wrong. Nasty buzzer noise. Nope. Nada. Not the case at all. Not only is this completely wrong, I wonder how much this affects a person who is thinking of taking up guitar lessons. If a person wants to perform, naturally I would say that they have this intense desire to share something within themselves with an audience. The funny thing is however, less than 1% of all the people I have ever taught fall into this category! It's not like there is nothing to share. Everyone has something, everyone is creative. But what I imagine most people want out of guitar is for it to enrich their lives. Should we sacrafice a richer life just because we think we should perform? Absolutely not.

Everyone must practice, practice, and practice more.

Again, totally false. Discipline? Practice hard for an hour in the morning, afternoon, evening, and do not even allow the thought of stopping come into your head? Well, if it works for you then do it. I think it's more important to have fun. Sometimes having too much self-discipline can completely de-rail our efforts. If guitar is a fun hobby to learn, then why kill it with too much practice? We want to enjoy our hobbies, not hate them.

If I'm not good at guitar, I won't have any fun.

This is one of those "If I had a nickel" statements. I understand the motivation behind this, too. How could we possibly have fun if we aren't good at playing guitar? The answer lies simply in one statement: "My name is Dave Wirth, I have been playing guitar for close to twenty years, and there are still guitarists out there that can absolutely smoke me. Few of them, however, have as much fun as I do." No matter what skill level you are, you can have fun. Oh boy, you can have fun.

There is one final question to ask: If we didn't have these assumptions when we started guitar or any new pursuit, what would happen? My guess is that we would have a lot more fun. To me, if it's not fun it's not worth doing.

I am really on this kick about lesson notes. It's probably my geek heart gushing, or the fact that I wish I was in my student's positions. I wish I had this sort of thing when I was learning guitar. It would have made learning so much easier. How?

It would have saved me energy and time.

Communication takes energy, as does practicing. Most of the people I get to work with have barely enough time to eat a satisfying meal, so it helps them to know exactly what to work on. I've noticed that the better my communication skills get, the faster they learn. I like how doing my lesson notes manages to get the point across. My hope is that when students are at the point of playing songs, they have barely expended energy in remembering what they were were supposed to work on. Hopefully, they simply read their lesson notes and pin-pointed what needed to do. I wish I had that when I was taking lessons.

I'd have a concrete history of the work I did.

I keep on thinking back to all the education I've have in my life, the hours spent learning from another guitar teacher (to be honest these people were saints to put up with me), and I realize that it's all a blur. I have no memory of the struggles I once had, so every time I reach a block, it feels like the very first one I've run into. Guitar still feels frustrating sometimes, probably because mastering it is just about impossible. Perhaps one of the reasons why I wanted to do this was because I could give someone a concrete history of their work and their progress. It wouldn't be a blur for them.

I'd have encouragement outside of my lessons.

Sometimes we learners have a hard time in-between our lessons. We may learn something, but then it's gone a hour after our lesson. For me, few things are as frustrating. I'm a geek about learning, and I want to learn more stuff all the time. I remember all the Argentine Tango classes I've taken, and how quickly I forgot what I learned as quickly as I left the dance hall. It's nice to have a good understanding of what we went over, at least as a reminder, so we can pick up where we left off. That's encouraging.

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You should click here to read more about online lesson notes.

Traditionally, we guitarists learn from a teacher or a set of teachers, and they guide us along our paths wherever they may lead us. Some teachers are good at what they do, and others not so much. Each teacher we work with is responsible for guiding us, but we are responsible for moving forward. This process can be improved tremendously.

What if the technology we have today augmented our ability to learn from a teacher we chose to work with, and thus completely change our views and expectations of learning forever?  What if we could learn guitar in a beautiful, satisfying, and completely enjoyable way? If learning anything was, dare I say it, an unbelievably awesome experience, would it make you want to learn more in general?

After I spill the beans this Friday, The School of Feedback Guitar will be the instigator of a new way of education. Ambitious? You betcha.

Friday, February 18th, Here on This Blog.

About seven out of every ten persons who schedule their first guitar lesson tell me something similar. "I'm starting almost completely from nothing. I hope you don't mind beginners. I bought this guitar about two months ago. I bought a book to go with my guitar, but I found it boring after about a week or so. At some point, I looked on the web for easy, beginner, guitar stuff to learn. You know, online guitar lessons. I got pretty frustrated about the lack of anything decent on the web. I realized that there was nothing that was going to help me except finding a teacher. Then I found you." What's interesting to me, as a teacher, is that neither book nor internet helped these people learn. Sure, it was a fun way to jump into guitar, but neither method yielded the results these folks were looking to achieve in terms of progress. It's interesting too to see that this person really wanted to learn, so they bought a guitar and a book. No fault there. The book they got was boring, so they tried Google and YouTube. No fault here either, as there is also great information to be had there as well. But neither source gave them what they were ultimately looking for-progress and skill. Perhaps it's at this point that we all realize we want to learn, and that we need a teacher. That's pretty telling. What fascinated me is this: Why, with all the technology that we have today-the systems, and the approaches-can we not teach guitar remotely?

There are lots of possible reasons why any of these learners get frustrated about learning via books or the web. Much of what is found on the web for guitar education is, well, sub-par. The results? Any disorganized presentation of curriculum is annoying. A philosophy behind why a certain concept is required might be inadequate and flawed. The excercises might be way above or below skill level. There could be huge gaps of ability, resulting in huge barriers that the learner has to recover from. There could be too much information to soak in. The curriculum might not be flexible to meet the needs of the learner. The learner might not be interested in what is being offered. There are a whole host of reasons.

Still, there are thousands of online guitar lesson sites out there. To the guitar teacher, the medium of online guitar lessons has got to seem pretty tempting. "Hey, I'll just systemize what has worked in the past and present in my face-to-face lessons online, somehow. Then, I can replicate this very same lesson four hundred times without breaking a sweat, and make a fortune!"

There is one major flaw: If the teacher is removed from the picture, the commitment to learning is removed as well.

Commitment, Online.

Anyone who used to get online with a dial-up modem back in the glory days of the internet understood that there was a lot of potential for doing something you weren't really allowed to do normally. One could do something without deference to social norms and have no fear of reprimand from a boss, co-worker, spouse, or friend. Anyone who explored the internet in those days understood that having that ability to walk away from any interaction was intregral to why they were there in the first place. To services like AOL or even CompuServe (remember them, anybody?), being anonymous was a major selling point of the experience.

AOL's commercial featuring David Cross hits the idea brilliantly:

When a person is anonymous, they are not accountable for their actions. Being unaccountable for their actions, they could leave at anytime if they violated the norms of whatever service they were taking part in. They could delete an account and start fresh, or just simply leave a chat-room. Although they valued the ability to get online and go search out these services, they were not obliged to go public with their activities. In my own brutal way of saying it, they were uncommitted.

The internet still seems like a place where identity is incredibly vague. I do not want to give the impression that I believe that this is bad. The web is still ripe for random anonymous net surfing opportunities, within reason. There are ample chances to be really, really stupid to other people and still get away with it. We can always walk away, unscathed. It's the same for online guitar lessons. We can still navigate away from a site if it isn't to our liking. If a person tries them out and they don't work (please remember that 70% of the people who come into guitar lessons with me had tried online and then promptly gave up), they won't feel bad for leaving the site. If the lessons were bad, then there's no reason to stay.

The game changes dramatically once a person walks into a guitar lesson, however. They are no longer anonymous and they are now accountable for their actions.

Accountability and Commitment

Many, many people out there may disagree with me on this, but I don't care. Online guitar lessons are completely ineffectual because of one reason: The lack of a professional relationship, a bonding of sorts, between a teacher and student working on something together creates a lack of both accountability and commitment. The teacher is there to help, the student is there to learn, and the professional relationship between the two is what facilitates the process of learning and teaching. There is nothing more. In an ideal teacher/student relationship, both parties feel intensely committed because they both feel accountable for their own actions-both of them affect each other. That's a good reason why I take teaching and learning so seriously. I like people, and I've found that no other excercise out there has made me grow more as a human being than has teaching. I am a life-long learner too. I've often felt that if I had the right reasons to study as well as the right teacher, the one I felt like I could give my heart to, then I could learn what I wanted to learn incredibly fast and well.

The larger the proximity between teacher and student (i.e. emotional distance, as with systemized online guitar lessons, or video conference lessons), the less chance for a professional relationship. The less chance for a professional relationship, the less the commitment. The less the commitment, the less the accountability. The less the accountability (in learning guitar at least), the less chance for fun to happen. In order to learn, we need to be ready to commit, and that's not always an easy thing to do.

Mark Elf is a jazz guitarist in NYC. When I was an undergrad, I cornered him and fired a bunch of questions at him about the music business. The following was one of his memorable quotes:

"Imagine this room to represent the entire amount of money in the music industry. You see those three bread crumbs on the floor in the corner? Those represent Jazz."

Ouch. Was it any better for classical guitar I wondered? Eh, no matter. I got accepted into a really good school, I should be fine, right?

I believe it was either (or both) Seth Godin or Hugh Macleod who said that youth tends to underestimate the competition, and speaking of which there is quite a lot of it in classical guitar. There are lots and lots of people doing the same thing, beating down the same doors. It's pretty hilarious. "Gotta get into Juilliard, gotta practice 50 hours a day. Sacrafice seeing the sun! COFFEE!"

The only way that I personally found to make money playing classical guitar that I could handle was to get a doctorate and get a job teaching at a university, and play shows on the side. Sounds pretty sweet right? I could be a professor, I could have my own library, tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, smoke pipe tobacco and say things like, "I disagree." It's not all roses, especially when considering the student debt. Eastman wasn't a cheap place to go to. Worth it, but not cheap.

But what about touring? The Ying String Quartet started by playing very small community centers, building their base of fans slowly. Eventually, they became a very highly regarded string quartet. They even ended up as the quartet in residence at the Eastman School of Music. Not bad. I like their story, because they really put themselves out there, which brings me to my final point: How many classical guitarists are really putting themselves out there? Are they too afraid of making a mistake?

The ones who are putting themselves out there recognize the trouble they are asking for, and they accept it. They accept the fact that they will not make an assured amount of money until later, when they have notoriety. They will make many mistakes. They will be burned quite a few times. They realize that they have a lot of work to do in their careers that equals or exceeds the amount of work it took them to have gotten where they wanted to be musically. But they do it anyways because they love it. Dan Lippel is one of these guitarists.

Dan and I were in a bar in NYC when we were talking about motivation. Dan said this:

"If during your darkest period of life, where everything is going to total s**t, you still feel as if you can't live without your guitar, then it's obvious what you must do.

I agree.

If you are a classical guitarist, and you want to be up there with the best classical guitarists at least as far as notoriety is concerned, do it. Don't mess around, just do it. Get out there, tour, and expect that people will call you crazy. It will not make sense, it will seem like you are hitting your head against a wall. But if you fight for it, it will come.