My approach to playing and teaching guitar.

I first got in to teaching guitar about 10 years ago, basically because there were people out there who wanted me to teach them. Actually, for a while people had been asking me "why don't you start teaching? It's easy money", but I resisted for various of reasons.

First of all, there are lot of guys out there who have been playing guitar for a few years, know maybe 2 variations of the Pentatonic scale and every song their favourite band ever recorded, and they start teaching. I've known a few guys like this, and I remembered thinking "this guy has terrible technique, knows virtually no theory at all, and he's only teaching people to sound exactly like he sounds!" When I finally decided to start giving lessons, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to be one of these types of teachers.

So with that in mind, I started to really look hard at my own playing technique, to make sure that I was using (and teaching) efficient techniques, rather than passing my bad habits on to my students. The other thing that I did was to start writing up everything that I wanted to teach in advance, rather than having to scrawl out hand written instructions and diagrams while my students waited.

Basically, my approach to practicing comes down to improving physical technique and fretboard knowledge at the same time. By "fretboard knowledge", I mean being able to play in key (for any key), from any position on the fretboard. I could never see the point in doing exercises to build technique, if you could never put those patterns into a musical context. With that in mind, I tried to come up with exercises that would increase left & right hand co-ordination, at the same time as drilling useful scale patterns into the subconscious.

My other goal was simply to make it as easy as possible to learn all of these concepts.