Teaching Guitar: How to Keep Students Engaged

Rewind time, to roughly 15 years ago. I was asked to do my first teaching gig. I was fresh out of music college and obsessed with prog metal guitar. My teaching gig was for a small group of school kids who had never played guitar… my lesson plan… 5 positions of the minor pentatonic scale! You can guess how it went… it just didn’t.

Now this is an extreme case, but over many years of teaching guitar at different levels, from the casual learner, adult night school, private 121 sessions and university; I’ve made many mistakes and refined my teaching, and continue to do so. Here are some things that I’ve found helpful to remember.

The student wants to play guitar. The important word here is play. How that manifests is different for everyone. Some just want to play their favourite songs, some want to refine a particular skill within music in order to play a certain way. Some don’t know anything about it, but want to find out, and we ‘play’ music on guitar, so play is at the centre of the journey.

This sounds obvious, but I’ve done it myself and I’ve seen so many teachers do it. They turn the play element into theoretical dogma. The way we’ve personally learnt to play might have been helped along by certain schemes and systems, but ultimately, we learnt to apply them through play, otherwise we couldn’t actually play. Its kinda like telling a joke then explaining it, the joke is never funny when explained. However, as a tutor we should be encouraging a curiosity of how music works and self-discipline to have a healthy practice ethic.

So our balancing act is that of play and craft. Craft being our conceptual and technical knowledge and ability. Most beginning guitar students don’t need to know 5 positions of the minor pentatonic, they need to be able to get an embodied experience of playing the physical instrument, this can be through songs, adding a chord or strumming pattern, getting the rhythmic feel embodied and a basic ability to tell between low and high pitches. Often the stuff us tutors can take for granted, like I did on my first teaching experience.

I started playing when I was 6, I was fortunate to be taught by a local singer/acoustic guitarist called Doug. He’d come around my house with his acoustic and for the 1 hour (A long time for a 6 year old!) we’d do nothing but strumming chords. What Doug would call ‘Round Robbins’. We’d sit on one chord, strumming at different tempos, he’d sing lyrics on top, he’d get me stamping my foot. Now and then, because I had ‘played’ so much because it was fun, I had developed the calluses and strength to learn a new chord. Once I had a few chords, we could start doing ‘round robbins’ of Dylan and Neil Young tunes. Eventually I could play ‘in time’ roughly enough to play along with his band, with other musicians. My Dad would also ask me to learn Dylan songs so he could sing along, this was a masterclass in following along wayward singers.

The whole aspect of this I want to emphasise is play. Its not for me to say ‘what to teach’ in your lessons or what is the best ‘method’ for students to learn. That’s totally subjective. But at any level of tutor/student, play HAS to be emphasized.

Another story. Recently I did some masterclasses for my friend Pete Roth who is a highly accomplished Jazz Guitarist. I’ve always had a bit of love/hate relationship with Jazz, I love the music, but often what was art is turned into a dogmatic list of methods that we must follow otherwise its not Jazz. However, Pete, whilst incredibly articulate in his teaching and his knowledge of Music, reminded me of my first guitar tutor Doug. After my masterclass, Pete would make a cup of tea and stick a few jazz standard charts down on the coffee table. We would then begin playing around the arrangement together on two acoustic guitars, he wouldn’t stop. There was no ‘prep’ or breaking down the track. We just kept going around and taking turns. At first, I could follow the chords fairly well, but playing the changes was like walking through a Christmas market with no hands free. But the more we did it, the more lines I would ‘land’ in my own way. I’d also be listening to how Pete approached the chords, but I wasn’t listening with my thoughts and ideals, I was listening like I’d listen to you if we had a conversation. I was picking up cues, contours, rhythms, phrasing ideas without know it and digesting them with my own vocabulary. I had to ‘survive’ with the tools I had in my craft, I had to use all the tools! And it felt great and I had learnt more about my own playing than any time studying a rote exercise or a licks package.

This isn’t to say that exercises and etudes don’t have their play, on the contrary. We need exercises as ‘spaces’ to explore new concepts and sharpen certain aspects of our technique. It's super important, but they are also very easy to over emphasise. As a teacher it can be easy to feel like your lesson has ‘value’ but adding tons of exercises, the more the better, the more the perceived value. We can get a lot of value out of one or two exercises done in a multitude of ways over doing many exercises in a half-arsed way! – We can squeeze out the musical value by approaching our exercises in many ways. An exercise can be for life, not just for Christmas depending on how we approach it.

Using exercises within and around our practice is just like going to the gym. You don’t go to the gym and continue lifting a bar bell when you leave, you pick up the shopping, you lift up your nephew, you stand upright in a queue for half an hour. You USE the strength you’ve gained, but you don’t use the exercise itself. Exercises are vehicles of exploration, developing pathways in the brain between your fingers and ears.

Let's say I work on an exercise designed to help me play and visualise triads within a scale pattern. I might focus on that in many ways. There’s the visualisation layer, actually seeing and recalling the information in free time, slowly. I might call out the intervals or name of the arpeggio. I might then work on the technique aspects, creating small sequences for each arpeggio, working on rhythm, timing and pick technique. I might work at different tempos, dynamics and group the sequences with different rests etc. Rather than writing this all out, I’d work on this in small enough chunks so I can actually ‘recall’ this in real time. All of this to work the musical muscles, creating and solidifying new neural pathways. Then after I’ve done my 5/10 minutes, I forget it. I don’t take the bar bell out the gym with me. I leave it until the next session. Over time, the work I’ve put in makes it easier to subconsciously recall this information with my improvisation and if I’ve practiced it playfully enough, it will sound musical and not rote.

All the time however I’m trying to keep music and play at the centre of my focus. This keeps it engaging. As a tutor this means I practice what I preach and I preach what I practice. The students can tell when we’re bullshitting them with “you should practice 10 hours because Steve Vai did a thing in the 90s” – if we’re doing things because someone said so, there’s a likelihood that we’re not really doing them honestly or fully. Steve Vai didn’t practice 10 hours because he watched a productivity video on YouTube, he did that because he was engaged, playful and curious. Whether he really did 10 hours a day or not doesn’t matter, that’s just a catchy title to grab our attention. He got there because of his love for music, not because he needed to tick the boxes of practice.

It's our job as tutors to learn about how our student learns, what’s motivating them to pick up the guitar, what are they struggling with and what are their values. It’s our job to enable, it's our responsibility to keep them encouraged, motivated on their own terms. But it’s not our failing if a student simply isn’t engaging out of choice, conscious or subconscious. We can wrap ourselves up in knots trying to ‘save’ students. The best bet is to each step, no matter how ‘complex’ as simple as possible. The first step is the only one we can take. So make that step fully with the student, one step at a time, with a kind resolve and encouragement.

As a tutor, it helps to be honest. Share from your own experiences, don’t just say things only because other tutors have said them. Keep it playful and always encourage curiosity. Don’t overload with concepts and ideals and if you do need to use this stuff, then encourage investigation, don’t just fill in the blanks for the student. They need to find out for themselves, whether they know it or not, why something ‘might’ be useful on their musical journey.