Material for older beginners
Hello everyone, especially martin and Mircea ,
I need some material, i.e. books, pieces and other activities for beginner students who aren't quite so small, i.e. they have a degree of maturity that means childish pieces and exercises are not quite so appropriate.
Do you have any suggestions?
More specifically, my students are:
- 14-year-olds, with a certain interest in the classical guitar, but would also like to learn some songs and stuff;
- An adult (another new student's mum). Not sure what she's into yet, but I expect she'd like classical and some songs, maybe Bob Dylan.
Any suggestions for material and/or approaches would be very helpful!!
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Ah! And yes, I meant martin and Mircea especially because material in German would be even more amazing!
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Roni Glaser Hey Roni, great question with which I struggled for a long time!
I like to work with the "Play Guitar" series by Michael Langer and accompany that with the "Saitenwege" by Otto Humbach once the student improves and is fluent with all the notes. I also heard great things about the way the Juan Antonio Muro's "Basic Pieces" progresses. All those books offer a great variety of pieces and exercises without having a funny little rabbit jumping through the scores. But to be fair, I am using the mentioned books for younger students as well.
Generally, I wouldn't compromise your methods just because a student is older. I did this a couple of years ago, starting to play pop and rock arrangements way to early simply because I was scared that the older students might loose interest if we didn't progress fast enough. But truth is: a student needs to get the basics right, otherwise the frustration down the road is inevitable! Moreover, absolute beginners tend to have an idea of what playing guitar is like ("I wanna strum chords like Ed, I wanna shred like Metallica"), but have no way of telling whether they are disciplined enough to go all the way in. Your job as teacher is to make them fall in love with the process and to overcome frustration so that they don't stop once a piece is a little harder than they expected (which happened a lot when I just grabbed random fingerstyle transcriptions off the internet).
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martin Thank you so much Martin!
There's loads of wisdom here, and loads that is helping and will help me refocus my teaching.
I'll check the books out too.
I have Muro's book, as recommended by Eduardo Inestal in his live stream, which I really like, but many pieces are a little childish for children who want to feel like they're big children. :)
What do you think about playing smaller excerpts from songs they like? For example a couple of chords or a melody?
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martin said:
Juan Antonio Muro's "Basic Pieces"Yest this is a great book. I've worked with many years with young students
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Marek Tabisz Good to know, thanks Marek!
What age range do you think it's good for?
Do you you also supplement it with other materials, both written/printed or activities and things you do in the lesson?
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Roni Glaser In recent years, I have used two books by Tatiana Stachak: "Guitar First Class" (for the youngest students) and "Guitar Extra Class" (for students aged about 11-17). Personally, I think both are among the best in Europe. They are available in Polish, English and German with a recorded CD. In addition, I used materials selected individually for each student, his problems and musical interests - sometimes written especially for him. I also used ( to encourage more talented youth) the arrangements of popular and entertaining pieces by my friend Mirek Drożdżowski (very good are pieces by Cees Hartog, Joep Wanders and Maria Linnemann - many of them you can listen to in YouTube). The participation of students of different ages and levels of advancement in a chamber ensemble (from duo to orchestra) is also perfect (and strongly motivates).
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Roni Glaser said:
What age range do you think it's good for?I think for about 7 to 14
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Marek Tabisz Thank you very much Marek! I read your replies in my email but didn't get round answering here. Very interesting stuff! Thanks for your help!
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I wish very much there had been Maria Linnemann pieces around to play when I was that age. They are so charming, not trite, simple enough but
with challenges. Lovely enough to want
to keep in your repertoire and real crowd pleasers.
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