I'm one of the many self-taught hacks out here playing guitar. When I was 14, I wanted to play the guitar and sound like those ragtimey fingerpickers on my Dad's folk and blues records, so I bought a used Piece O' Crap acoustic guitar and a chord book (with my paper route money) and started playing.

The sorts of music that interest(ed) me – swing, blues, folk, different pop music forms from about 1925 to about 1975 – tend to lean heavily on a few core sets of chords. I taught myself to hear & play the patterns. Over the years I've learned the basics of music theory & composition, and taken a few piano and guitar lessons, but mostly I lean on my ear and an intuitive grasp of chord structure and melodic patterns. These days I'm an intermediate to advanced fingerstyle player/vocalist (depending on who's listening).

Have also taken on guitar students now and then teaching in a mainstream sort of way, but realized that the way I teach guitar is not the way I learned guitar. So when an opportunity to teach a workshop came up recently I tried to think of an approach or method that's more like my own experience.

So this is an experiment. I'd like to know what you folk-folks think of the roughed-in curriculum described below. Have you taught or learned in a similar way? What works? What doesn't work?

Absolute Basics Acoustic Guitar Workshop:
The goal of the 2-hour workshop is to give participants enough introductory basics to tune the guitar, listen for & start playing basic chord patterns in popular and folk music, learn a bit o' basic strumming, and enjoy playing the guitar. Workshoppers will learn to:

1. Tune guitar to Open D – D/A/D/F#/A/D (I want a tuning that's obvious – you strum it open and it's a major chord! - and can be used to create simple chords building from the D Major scale.

2. Play some basic 2-finger & barre chords patterns so that they're introduced to D, Em, F#m, G, A & A7 and Bm. I'll probably refer to these chords in only number terms with D as 1st chord, etc. in order to support the next section of the workshop.

3. Listen to basic chord patterns found in folk, country and popular music – my thought here is that along with technical aspects of guitar playing, participants can start building/exploring a bit of musical intuition. We'll put down the guitars for a while and listen to something like the following on CDs:
~ 1/4/5 Blues Chord Pattern – basically a 12-bar blues; examples could be Jimmie Rodger's Train Whistle Blues, Bo Diddley's Before You Accuse Me
~ 1/4/5 Pop Chord Pattern – Young Rascal's Good Lovin', McCoy's Sloopie
~ 1/6m/4/5 Pop Pattern – Everly Bros' Dream, Dream, Dream, Then You Can Tell Me Good-Bye; the bridges on both of these tunes present some common patterns as well
~ couple of other standard chord patterns

4. Play some of the chord patterns introduced in the previous section. Intro to 3 songs working with simple chord charts.

5. Strum 4 beats to a measure. Concepts of off-beat and on-beat.

6. a short review of:
~ elements of combining your guitar with singing
~ use of the capo
~ finger and hand care

Each participant must bring along a 6-string acoustic guitar. Materials received by workshop participants include a full-scale pitch pipe, tuning instructions using the pitch pipe, a set of basic chord charts, and 3 songs with words and chords.

Could provide more detail, but this should give you enough of the concept to work with. I'd appreciate any friendly support and/or criticism for this rough draft. Workshops are scheduled for late-May & early-June. I'm screening out people who're looking to build on other lessons, chord books, etc. as they'll likely not get much out of the workshop.

Thanks!

- Merritt


"It's all one big note." - Frank Zappa