Music school killed my passion

Hey teachers, leave them kids alone!

I hear this a lot from guitarists who have attended music schools and it’s a shame… it’s a shame, but it’s totally understandable!

There you are, first day of music school and you think it’s going to be great, you can barely hide your excitement!

You are finally going to learn how it all works and maybe one day you’ll be able to write songs, guitar parts, improvise, maybe even express yourself, through an instrument!

But it doesn’t really happen that way, now does it?

Admittedly, teenagers tend to find someone else to blame way before they take responsibility for their own learning and perhaps this is why little change in music schools from year to year.

Complaints from students is usually seen as: “they’re just complaining, they are teenagers, what do they know?”

Simple solution to this; the music school simply blame the students back! They put the responsibility of learning back on to you. If it only was that simple…

The problems with music schools are many; let’s take a moment to examine a few subjects.

Theory!

The main problem with music theory taught in schools is that the theory teacher assumes the best way to understand music is to look at it on a piano.

And yes that would make sense, especially to a piano student! Maybe even to a singer, or a musician who want to write scores, arrange, transcribe, orchestrate, because the piano is laid out in the simplest way; one note after another.

It would make perfect sense if the instrument used when doing all these things was a piano!

But we didn’t sign up for that now did we? We wanted to play guitar, didn’t we?

The problem with learning music theory on a piano is that the harmonic structure of the piano is completely different to that of the guitar.

As a guitarist you will learn very little from the fact that all white keys on a piano are notes from the C major scale, or that Stevie Wonder plays in Ebm because all black keys form the Eb minor pentatonic scale.

None of these facts have anything to do with guitar, which, after all is what we are trying to learn!

Consequentially, theory lessons tend to get less and less populated throughout the year…

Let’s move on to ensemble/live performance since this one is even more hilarious!

Ensemble/Live Performance

Let’s put all the kids in a band and get them to play songs that the music school choose… As I am writing this sentence it becomes even clearer that this concept will never work.

In the real world you’d join a band with people who have similar taste and want to achieve similar goals to you.

You choose/write the songs the band is going to play based on what you as a group want, collectively.

Someone else makes all those decisions for you (who to play with, what songs etc) and the teenager is without a doubt going to have an issue or two!

The negative spiral has begun and tends to escalate during the year, downwards…

Sight Reading!

Sight-reading, well… this topic is almost too funny to be true. Let’s just prove that this doesn’t work by asking our selves this question:

-How many guitar players do I know (aside from Classical Guitarists) that can read music?

Yeah, I thought so… none.

Let’s see, what else do we learn in a music school?

Singing!

I didn’t realize this at the time when I was a music student in my late teens but singing is absolutely vital in order to connect with music on a deeper level. So I guess I only have myself to blame for not trying harder with the choir!

It may not make much sense at the time, you might hate your own voice (don’t we all?) and you might not feel as if singing will help your guitar playing, but believe in me, it does!

Not that the music school would explain why singing helps with guitar, but still, it does. It helps even more if you try to play the vocal melody on the actual guitar, but let’s not get that adventurous!

Should the choir lesson be done with sight singing and have elements of aural perception (ear training) exercises as well then we would be on to a winner, sadly this didn’t happen in my music school…

Guitar Lessons!

There are a few different approaches here; in the music college I went to in the early 90s we had the concept of weekly individual one-hour lessons.

This was without a doubt the most useful experience I had and the breakthrough in my learning of the guitar. But not because of what my teacher taught me, but what he didn’t teach me.

I’d like to see this as the next breaking point in my learning experience because now I started to realize that the reason it had all been so fuzzy was because there was no set way to learn guitar, there was no system, there was no goal. If you wanted one, you had to come up with it yourself!

And this is my main problem with guitar schools; if you have to do all the work yourself, then how are you going to fit that in, in between classes?

I was about 16 when this happened, so after 7 years of trying to find someone who could teach me the guitar I had begun to realize that there was noone but myself who could do this.

However, this would be a slow and painful learning curve that I refused to fully embrace (that and the fact that I had to go to what seemed like an endless amount of lessons).

I quickly removed the thought from my mind and begun to look for the teacher who would teach me how it all worked, he had to be out there and I was determined to find him!

To be continued…

-Guru

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