Teacher, Teacher

Well, that was how Mike rolled with us, and we rolled merrily down our road to nowhere.

My third student came many years later. It was a 12-year-0ld daughter of one of my wife’s cousins. For the first time I wasn’t training someone to join my band. For the first time I had to commit to teaching someone how to read music, a skill I’d done my best to ignore. A local music store suggested a cool beginner guitar book, and we walked through its lessons on a weekly basis before I ended each session with some blues scale exercises and introduction to classic chord progressions. We did this for about a year. It was fun for both of us, I think. She went on to take actual lessons, and now I think she still plays with her husband, who is also a guitarist.

Yesterday I gained my fourth guitar student, my oldest son. He first played piano and viola in lower and middle school before switching over to trumpet. All those lessons were under the supervision of his school music teachers, beside the piano lessons, which my uncle conducted. I’ve always put out the offer to introduce him to the guitar and he’s got a great musical mind, but he wanted to play his own instruments. It was probably a good move, knowing that this could be one more thing we’d butt heads over, as we did in a loving father-and-son way through years of me being his soccer coach. I never pushed the guitar thing on him. I was happy that he loved music and showed promise as a budding rock snob.

As he’s reached his late-teen years, I have hoped that he would be interested in joining a band. I honestly think being in a band is a great way to “keep off the streets.” Even during my most degenerate years as a band member, my degenerate activities were funneled back into the larger purpose of  the band. My wife and I had been saying that, should our son go down his own walk on the wild side, it would be good if those activities were somehow being used as fuel for the greater good of a band, not just an end result in and of themselves. Does that make sense?

Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago our son surprised us at dinner by stating that he wanted to learn guitar. He realized that unless Beulah reformed or some partial version of the Specials needed a young American kid, there wouldn’t be a lot of rock bands he liked in need of a trumpet player. I had to hold in my urge to jump out of my chair with excitement. “Yeah,” I said, trying to contain myself, “that would be cool.”

For the last 2 weeks I gently offered to give him his first lesson. He was interested, but he was busy. Yesterday he found himself bored out of his gourd. After throwing a little fit over how bored he was, he came to me and asked to have his first lesson. I showed him around the strings and the fretboard. He already knew so much about reading music and how the notes work that he could anticipate whole steps vs half steps. He always had a delicate touch when he was a boy playing piano and viola. His hands were as delicate as ever. He was immediately able to fret notes without all the dampening and buzzing that my past students suffered. For about 20 minutes he walked up and down the notes on the strings, from low E to the G on the high E string. Then I showed him a G chord, which he immediately grasped and could play without dampening and buzzing.  He wanted to learn how to strum a rhythm, so I showed him one. “That’s the Johnny Cash rhythm!” he said, as he learned to adjust the angle of the pick on his upstrokes. I showed him a C chord, which was harder for him, but still…he was pretty good at fretting a C, then changing between chords.

“How am I doing?” he’d stop to ask. “Really, am I doing this right?”

I didn’t want to be the gushing Dad who was too-quickly deeming my son a guitar prodigy, but he was doing better than I’d ever done in my first 2 weeks of lessons. He was doing better than my past students on Day 1. “You’re off to a good start,” I told him, “keep it up.”

He opened the kid’s starter book that I used with my wife’s cousin and started whizzing through lessons. “It’s good that I know how to play music,” he said, as he went from exercises on just the high E string, then the B, then the G. “Ooh, ‘5-Note Song’: this should be a challenge!” He worked on the little 12-measure exercises in the book for another half hour.

“How am I doing?”

“You’re doing great. You have an advantage that you can read music,” I said. “I used to pretend to read the music for my teacher once I could memorize a song.”

He wanted to learn another chord. I showed him a D, which he was able to do all right, but not good enough to incorporate into switches with his G and C chords. I showed him an Em. “This is easy,” he said after a few difficulties with switching from the C chord.

I told him I’d work to build some classic chord progressions, as he worked toward 4 chords: 12-bar blues, “Wild Thing”/”Louie Louie”/”Gloria”, the “Blue Moon” progression; and the Buddy Holly variations on all of the above. He wanted to work on the first part of the “Blue Moon” progression, the G to Em. He learned the basic rhythm I showed him and then spent another 20 minutes playing along with me.

“How am I doing?” he kept asking. “Really, how am I doing?”

“Listen,” I told him, “you’re doing much better than most people do on Day 1 of a guitar lesson. One of these days I’ll dig out some tapes from our first band, tapes from us rehearsing and learning our instruments for a year. At this rate, in 3 weeks you would have been good enough to join our band.”

He kept playing, occasionally slipping out of position owing to fatigue, but sticking to good form, with his thumb pointing up, as I tried to impress on him, so he wouldn’t fall into my lazy habits.

“How am I doing? Am I doing this right?”

I finally found an analogy that I thought would make sense to him. “Remember when you guys were starting out soccer and trying to learn how to juggle? There were some kids who couldn’t even get the ball to land on their foot for a single juggle. Most of the kids were like you, able to get 2 juggles in after 20 tries. Then there was Charlie, would could juggle 5 times right out of the chute. In beginner guitar terms, you’re playing like Young Charlie juggled.”