Teaching guitar...

[DanHund]

My drummer is wanting me to give him guitar lessons. Now before you go running away screaming, he already plays some. He has a fairly decent foundation, in that he knows most of the usual chords, and can keep up pretty well if we are just strumming.

Some areas that could use some immediate attention...

-fretboard knowlege, what notes are where up and down the neck
-he wants to learn some scales, with an eye towards palying some simple leads
-more advanced theory, what are the building blocks of chords and the scales behind them



Now I have found umpteen sites with cool little Java applets that will build chords and scales for you, but does anyone know of any sites that would have those types of teaching materials suitable for printing? Maybe some blank chord charts and fretbord charts, that I could draw things out for him.


Any suggestions? I have never taught before. And alot of what I know is self taught. I've played for almost 20 years, by just figuring things out. I've figured out what works, without really knowing why it works. I'm not sure how to teach what I know about guitar.

[Jo]

Dan here's a couple pdf files that might help.

One is the fretboard (http://kites.org/jo/prs/misc/fretboard.pdf) and the other is for chord boxes (http://kites.org/jo/prs/misc/chordboxes.pdf). They're just a couple Exel spreadsheets I converted to pdf.

[DanHund]

Thanks Jo. Pretty smart to just make them in Excel :)

[Jo]

Well I hope they're of some use to you, I sometimes use them when I'm trying to figure stuff out. Especially the chord boxes, I can read those faster than I can read tabbed chords.

[johnreardon]

Dan, don't know if this is any good to you:

http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/moneychords/turnarounds.html

[DanHund]

Dan, don't know if this is any good to you:

http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/moneychords/turnarounds.html
Looks like some good information there. Thanks John.

[darial]

I've tried to teach a couple of "just strummers" with mixed success. I started them out with learning the names of the notes on the fretboard and getting away from the "the note on the 5th string at the 4th fret" mentality. One guy dropped out there - too much work aparently - and went back to singing kumbayah around the campfire. Oh well. The other guy who stuck with it did verry well. I had him learn scale and chord forms out of the Fretboard logic series, theory from some textbook or other, lead technique from Speed Mechanics for lead guitar, jazz chord voicings from the Mel Bay chord & scale book, and symetric scales and some alternate chord theory from Pat Martino's book.

I got some drum and bass rhythm tracks to famous songs to practice rhythm guitar over along with some complete backing tracks to improvise over. Those were a big help. And of course a metronome is essential.