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Topic: Getting started doing lessons

So, you've got a student, and you are a bit nervous. Relax, you'll get over it quickly. Do's and don'ts for starting off:

- Don't over-prepare
- Do have TAB, treble clef paper, empty chord diagrams and blank paper
- Don't go too fast, relax
- Don't dump too much info on the students in the first class, you should be gathering info at this point.
- Do ask them lot of questions and listen to the answers.
- Do get them started learning what they what to learn

The first class is for:

- finding out what the student wants to do
- finding out what the student can already do
- finding out how much effort they want to put in
- asking yourself if you can help them learn this (unless they are obviously better than you, you can. A lot of people get nervous or insecure at this point, or overly modest. Wait til you've done 4 classes or so, then you'll have a much better perspective).

The first thing to do is to ask a few questions and listen to what your student has to say. Ask them:

What do you want to learn?
What kind of music do you want to play?

This is the best advice I have: let your students tell you what they want to learn, and then go straight for that.

Here are some examples of students answers to these questions, sort of case studies:
What do you want to learn?
- Student starting from almost zero (false beginner)."I want to sing and play acoustic to play at home and for friends."
"Knocking on heavens door". No sense in wasting time. First I had him sing the tune while I played chords. Then we looked at changing from G to D (with a pivot finger - ring finger on the 3 fret of B string - pivots are always good for beginners). And then D to Am, Am to G. I stressed that keeping the rhythm was key. We went over the open chords for a few lessons (maybe 16, quite a while), going slowly, and adding easy "singing with chords" tunes (house of the rising sun, bad moon rising, wonderwall, etc.)

What kind of music do you want to play?
- Two young students, 15 or 16, a year or two playing. "We want to learn black metal." Me: "Oh, you mean like neo-classical or goth." Them: "No, no, goth sucks, we hate goth." I had them bring me tape of songs they liked, and we started with power chords, and stuck to strictly goth.

What do you want to learn?
- A young guy, 18, 5 years playing, good ear, could repeat riffs I played, serious about getting good. "I like blues, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn." Straight for "Mary had a little lamb" and then the solo. This was way above his level, but I told him it was easy. He learned it in a month, and then went on to take another giant leap in another 2 months or so, and I had him come gigging with my band. We went on to look at everything: harmony, rhythm, chord chart and treble clef reading, intervals, arrangement, dissonance, bass lines ... and every style outside his preferred ones (punk, heavy, jazz, the old songs jazz is based on (grandpa music), atonal (spooky movie music), funk, classical, Dixie, country ...). When his technique was about the same level as mine, I recommended another teacher. 

The point is: go directly for the thing the student wants, don't take a round about way to get there.

One very important last thing:

The mistake a lot of teachers make is they don't teach the students what they want to learn, they teach them what they want to teach them.

You may be studying modes, and that may be forefront on your mind, but that's not necessarily what your students want or need, or you may be into jazz or blues, but the student may see this as a waste of time. This happens with blues a lot -students don't want to learn it, even though it's just a stepping stone - and you have to know when to give in.

It's fine to introduce new things to keep things going, but let the students decide if it's right, and make them ask lots of questions.

I may put a second post on this, we'll see.

P.S. A teacher's trick: If the student asks you something you have no clue about, say "That's a really good question, let's come back to that next week", and then study, study, study.

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Re: Getting started doing lessons

Well what a fantastic Post to kick off this section of the forum.

I have Dugg this post and I would urge others reading to do the same using the links to the left hand side of this screen - really fantastic.