Here’s a bit of a lesson on how to play Heart of Gold. When I give individual lessons, I slow down a LOT to show students how to play this. The video quality is lousy when I do close up shots, but at least it’ll give you an idea of how it is done:
Try it out and see what you think! And if you’d like to learn the song one-on-one, email me 
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Image by Johan Koolwaaij via Flickr
Teaching kids to play guitar is a whole different experience from teaching adults. Over the years I’ve taught many children, with varied results! One thing you have to keep in mind with children is the fact that they have shorter attention spans . I tend to take little breaks from playing with them to ask them questions, just so they don’t get too frustrated or restless. Then we get back to the music. On the other hand, kids are little learning sponges and they don’t tend to be as hard on themselves or have the higher expectations of themselves that adults do.
If you are considering giving your kids music lessons, here are some things to consider: Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re scouring the internet for songs to play, you’ve probably come across the word “tab” or “tablature” along with a weird mixture of lines and numbers and strange codes like this:
e|--------------------|-------------------------| B|--------------------|-------------------------| G|----5---5----0---0--|---5-~~~-----------------| D|----5---5----0---3--|---5-~~~-----------------| A|--------------------|-------------------------| E|--5---5----0---3----|-5-----------------------|
If you’ve never seen tab before, it can appear confusing at first. I’ll give you a brief explanation of what it all means, but bear in mind one thing: there are a lot of tabs out there that are either incorrect, or have different bits of information on them depending on who created the tab!
If you bother to purchase a guitar song book these days, you’ll notice that they often now include tab, along with regular notation (or sheet music, if you will). The reason they do this is because a larger percentage of guitar players don’t read music these days, but do read tab. Tab is what you might call music “shorthand”, in that it gives just enough information to show you how to play something without getting too complicated.
I am going to take the above tab and break it down so you understand what everything means.
The dotted lines in the tab above (————) are the strings of your guitar! So you’ll notice that there are six of them.
—————-
—————-
—————-
—————-
—————-
—————-
Some of you, like me, take a break from playing for awhile for one reason or another. I usually take the month of August off teaching to re-charge, but that leaves me with little in the way of calluses by the time September rolls around again!
If you haven’t picked up your guitar for some time, here are a few pointers:
1. Treat your playing just as you did when you were first learning. Don’t over do it for the first week or two, but DO try to pick it up every day to play for 10 minutes or so at a time. You can pick it up more than once a day, of course, but until those calluses get built up again, you’re better off taking it slow!
Here are some tips about finger and hand placement when playing the guitar.
When a new student came to me once and told me that her last teacher, who was actually a piano teacher, told her that her fingers needed to be in the middle of the fret on the fretboard, I thought that misinformation was an anomaly. However, since then I’ve come across several people who’ve had the same misinformation. Here’s a picture showing where NOT to place your finger: