by Tom Hess
The electric guitar has advanced far beyond the time when someone could teach himself (or herself) to become a world class guitar player. If your ambition is to become a competent guitar player and a competent musician, you need a competent guitar teacher. Even if your goals are more modest, you can reach those goals far more quickly, easily and efficiently with the guidance of the right guitar teacher. Much of the information that is needed to learn about guitar playing (and music in general) is available from many different sources. There are hundreds of books, instructional videos, CD-ROMs and, of course, the internet. Even though a lot of information is readily available, there exists a lot of incorrect, incomplete and otherwise bad information (this is especially true for a lot of information found on the internet!). You will need the aid of an excellent teacher to teach you how to fully understand and apply the correct information. You can save yourself a lot of unnecessary frustration and disappointment by studying with the good teacher. Remember that text books, CD-ROMs, instructional videos and the internet cannot answer your specific questions. They cannot offer you advice on your guitar playing, song writing, ear training, etc. They cannot listen to your playing and point out any mistakes or flaws that may be present. Some text books are great and I have seen some pretty good CD-ROMs out there too, but you still need the aid of an excellent teacher to guide you through everything and to help you to develop your abilities and musicianship correctly and efficiently.
Why don't girls play guitar? asks the BBC News Magazine. Which is a strange generalization, I reckon, because the trend over the last few years seems to be that more girls than ever have been taking up the guitar. Haven't they? They must be building all those Daisy Rock, Luna, Fender Hello Kitty, and Kramer "Jewel" guitars for someone, surely? However, it's a pity that the marketing departments of some of these companies seem to think that in order to appeal to the female market a guitar needs to be pink or hideously cutesy in some way.
How cool is this? For several years now, Paul Rubenstein has been showing schoolkids in Brooklyn, New York, how to make electric guitars.
The kids each design, cut out, build and paint their own six string creations. They even get involved in the electronics side of things, winding their own pickups and building amps too!
Music lessons weren't like this back in my day. We used to have a "music trolley" laden with beaten-up drums, tamborines, glockenspiels, and those most hated of noise-makers, recorders. A ghastly discordant racket was the result. We could only dream about guitars.
What better way to get kids interested in music than to explore the science of how a musical instrument such as the guitar works, to take the hands-on approach and build these instruments, and then to play and record them?
Congrats to all the kids for their cool designs, and to their teacher Mr R for dreaming up the scheme in the first place!
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