How To Teach Advanced Guitar
Teaching Guitar to Advanced Players
Teaching more advanced guitar players comes with its own unique challenges but before we look at that in greater detail it may be a good idea to decide just what constitutes an "advanced" guitarist
What is an "advanced" guitar player?
For no other reason than this is my website Im going to define what I mean by "advanced" guitarist. I realise that what follows is a totally arbitrary definition and that you (or anyone else) might choose a completely different set of attributes and set benchmarks at points far removed from my own but for the purposes of this page Im going to say that an advanced guitar player is someone who has gone through the beginner and intermediate stages and therefore can handle all common scales, open and bar chords and who is confident and proficient at moving between them
Technical players with little or no theoretical knowledge
Often this type of player can be technically very proficient in terms of whizzing about solo and single note passages and more and more they may be able to play incredibly involved and complicated music because of exposure to sites like youtube etc where it is possible to gain access to note by note instructions for a bewildering range of music. The problem is that even though they may be able to do it quite often they don't know what they are doing
The best thing that you can do to improve the quality and potential of this type of guitar player is to help them to understand how music works rather than just giving them some new places to put their fingers
Advanced Guitarists
Im going to say that an advanced guitar player is somebody who can play with a high level of technical proficiency and who can also understand (and explain if they were required to) how each note that they play affects or interacts with the chords that they are playing over
Our job as guitar teachers is to help intermediate level players to make the transition to the "advanced" stage
Below you can see links to pages that go into individual areas of teaching guitar to more advanced players in greater detail
Teaching Music Theory To Intermediate and Advanced Guitar Players
It is not uncommon to find a guitar student who can play things that are technically way in advance of how they actually think about and understand the instrument. Follow the link below to see a page designed to help us to "bridge the gap" and to create a much more well rounded musician with the three basic elements of musicianship (theory, technique and repertoire) in an effective balance
Teaching Jazz Guitar
Most guitar teachers don't teach Jazz or even play it but for those who wish to do so we offer an effective (and fun) "way in" to the subject
How to teach Song Writing to Guitar Players
A bit like Jazz, Song Writing is sometimes regarded as being one of the "dark arts" and teachers tend to shy away from the subject in order concentrate on areas where they can feel that they are in safer territory but there is a craft to song writing (common song structures etc) that all students (and teachers for that matter) will benefit from understanding
We also have a range of backing tracks designed to go "Beyond The Basics"
Backing Tracks for Intermediate and Advanced Guitarists
This site also has a whole load of backing tracks that can be used in order to teach more advanced concepts to players who have mastered the basic theoretical and technical skills to play the guitar