So, my student who was making a last ditch effort to learn guitar from a 3rd instructor (me) had his second lesson last week. We had contact during the week and to say he sounded exuberant would be an understatement. He was looking forward to our lesson and so was I.
He was well prepared, practice-wise and well prepared with some good questions, too. I think he was a little surprised by having been well practiced. yet making mistakes when he played for me. Anyone who has had an instructor has lived through that unsettling and humbling experience numerous times until they realized that once you and your axe emerge from your practice space, you need to over practice to compensate for the stress mistakes one tends to make when they are playing for someone else. It's a shocking and memorable lesson.
His sight reading wasn't flawless, nor was his ear training, but he did very well, considering the morass of confusion to which he was previously subjected.
At one point he showed me a lesson assignment one of his previous non-teachers gave him. He had no idea what it meant and the non-teacher didn't explain it well enough for him to understand. I can't believe I just wrote that. The guy didn't explain it even marginally - never mind enough for him to understand. I'll try to explain what it was. Imagine a chord diagram grid with numbers at the fret locations of the sequence of sounds of a particular variety of pentatonic scale. Don't imagine it, take a look:
This diagram didn't have finger numbers (which are not really necessary with a diagram, since it's understood that you're fingering in the position of the diagram) but rather it had some Arabic numbers that weren't finger numbers. It confused my student and the first thing he asked me about it was if there was more than one place to play the A that on the 5th fret of the low E string. If you are a novice and you look at this cryptic (because of lack of information) diagram, it's a reasonable question.when I explained that open A and the 5th fret low E string A are the same pitch. He didn't understand why the 3 different 6s were on the diagram. He said the non-teacher gave it to him (actually, his diagram was a small segment of what I've illustrated above) and the show-er told him it was phrasing. (Not!) The following week he played a chord progression and wanted my student to play "phrasing" over his chords. I mean, really?!?! I knew it was bad out there, and devolving quickly, but I hadn't imagined the state of what's broadly called "guitar lessons," was barely on life support.
My first question was, did the non-teacher explain and have the student work with major or minor scales. No, he hadn't. I explained to my student that the Arabic numbers on the diagram were the degrees of the the pentatonic's corresponding major scale. He didn't have a clue what I meant. Neither would you if you'd only been shown weird diagrams, been given an incorrect tab for some song and never heard a word nor played a major scale. I mean really, what is the point of highlighting degrees of a scale about which the student has no knowledge? It can only precipitate confusion. All I can guess it that this non-teacher was some guitar hack who wanted to try to pick up some extra cash and didn't have a clue how to teach guitar. I can also guess that he looked at some other lame person's YouTube "lesson" and did to my student what the YouTube non-teacher did. Man! (If this mirrors your experience as a student and you live where I teach, please contact me. I can teach you to play and understand exactly what you're doing. Then, you'll be a musician, not a hack nor robot.)
My student finally doesn't feel like learning to play correctly and well is something beyond his reach.
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