So, what to expect from your first guitar lesson? If you play already, we’ll have discussed you’re playing and what you’re looking to get out of the lesson in advance. It’s not necessary in any way to have a firm, determined goal, but it’s just to give me an idea of where you might be and to have a rough lesson plan. If you’re comfortable playing, we’ll play a bit together at the start, then analyse a piece of music, working through the techniques and construction. Involved.
Exactly the same idea applies too if you’re a complete beginner, or very new to playing.
One question I often get asked is ‘How many lessons will it take until I can play?’. It’s a difficult one to answer as the question is really what does being able to play an instrument mean. Broadly, I would say that if you can keep rhythm and change between chords to sing along with, this is the start of the being able to play an instrument ladder, and really doesn’t take too long, depending how much time you have to practice.
To do this, there’s a few fundamentals that you need to get down, so the focus of the first few lessons will be on these.
First up is holding the instrument correctly and learning to play a couple of single notes to get a feel for pressing down the strings. This only takes a few minutes but is really important for what comes next
First Guitar Lesson
The guitar is fundamentally a chordal instrument, so first stop on the journey is learning a few chords. I usually start with G, C and D chord, getting used to the shapes and the mechanics of moving between them. The trick to this really is being able to move your fingers independently of each other so there will be a couple of little exercises to help with this.
To go along with the chords we’ll look at some basic rhythm, and a little introduction to single note melody, otherwise known as playing a tune.
First Banjo Lesson
By far the most popular tuning for the 5 string banjo is G tuning where playing the open strings produces a G chord. We add a C and D to this, and have the structure for playing hundreds of songs. Along with these chords we’ll start practicing the basic rolls performed with the right hand. There are 4 of these: the basic strum, forward roll, backward roll and alternating thumb. This is the backbone of banjo playing. The banjo can be used to play any style of music, and there’s also a well-defined repertoire for banjo. We’ll introduce one of these songs, firstly as a melody, then look at how to incorporate the right hand rolls into the tune
First Mandolin Lesson
The mandolin is primarily a melody instrument so it makes sense to start with playing some single notes, and look at how to hold and use a plectrum. You can play any style of music on the mandolin, but as with the banjo, there is large repertoire of ‘mandolin’ music out there drawn from Scots and Irish traditional, bluegrass along with some rock and jazz. I favour starting with some trad or bluegrass although none of this is ever set in stone. We’ll also look at chords as playing rhythm is always important.
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