musicteachers « Guitar Life

Building Style ⇔ Experiential Exploration

This is a modified reprint from Music Makers on I Love Guitar. Style can mean a lot of things. How an artist represents her or himself – whether in image, import, lyrics, and/or musical expression, among many other things – is their style. Check out 

The Purists and the Purists

There are many roads into musical zones. And, zones are ever-present. What works for some, to get into one, can work for others. Universals do exist. Yet, there isn’t some pre-given zone waiting for discovery. We shape our world through perception, action, experience, and interpretation. There may be many classes of purists. Let’s discuss two possible types. The first, the replicators, [...]

Life-Long

The guitar’s accessibility, versatility, portability, & ideal shape, makes it a perfect fit for human musicking. Music is a lifelong endeavor. Yes, we can learn to play using advanced systems that enhance & speed up the process, yet ’7 days to mastery’ or ‘be a pro in 10 easy lessons’ is impossible & a touch misleading. The kind of thinking [...]

Secrets

We hear so much about the secrets to playing guitar. They always seem to revolve around separating us from our cash. Can we just say it out loud: there are no secrets to playing guitar in the sense they are being paid for. If someone knows something, and we don’t, and they withhold it from us until we give them [...]

Cut Flowers

The Cut Flowers Theory is that we derive aesthetic enjoyment from flowers that are cut, in a vase, on the table, in the hall, etc. & that this idea can be applied to learning (learning anything, but our topic will be guitar). The other side of this is Roots. We’ll touch in on this in a moment. When we learn [...]