The old adage “Experience is the best teacher” is pretty accurate, although I’ll add one refinement to that which is that “someone else’s experience is also good too”. I tell my students all the time that they don’t need to repeat my mistakes. Benefit from my pain and embarrassment!
One push I’ve been making the last few years with my students is that they learn entire songs and build a repertoire. When I was in high school, I had the ultimate wakeup call to drive that point home.
The brother of the girlfriend of the bassist in my group of high school buddies that were my first “band” was going into the US Army and naturally, there was a big party planned for him. Somehow the local Elks Lodge was hired and there was an open bar for a couple of hundred high school kids (this factors into our story later) and it was somehow decided that we would be the entertainment for the night.
Hubris dictated that we take the gig but the reality was that my buddies and I had spent the last year or so after school playing the intros and main riffs to all of our favorite Ozzy, Ratt and Iron Maiden songs but we had never put together enough songs in their entirety to play even a single set’s worth of music. The night of the party we stalled and stalled until we finally had to start playing. I was going to be exposed as a total fraud in a matter of minutes but finally, we started the introduction to “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne. I’m pretty sure that was one song that we had a reasonable expectation of being able to play all the way through. I remember the crowd going nuts thinking “they are going to be really disappointed in about a minute”. Suddenly and without warning the house lights in the room went on, the Garden Grove police department stormed into the room and kids started throwing bottles. The club managers had finally realized that the room was full of underaged drinking kids and called the cops on their own venue. One near riot later and all my classmates had heard was me cranking the first riff to “Crazy Train” through my Marshall half-stack and my reputation was still somewhat intact.
That’s kind of an extreme example but the reality is that most people have the experience of picking up an instrument at a jam or other get-together or even to try out a new guitar in a store and realize that they really have nothing to play. I’m not sure why this is such a thing with guitarists but if you think about it, we are usually attracted to music because of songs that trigger some manner of response in us but guitar can be so tricky to become proficient on that we bog down in the physical challenges of just making sounds in time. Sometimes we struggle with chord voicings or strumming in time or we get fixated on a specific technique and never really move on to learning complete songs. That was me as a young player and it has been hundreds of students that I’ve taught over the years. As a response to that, I have a bag of songs that I teach that I have complete charts for and are integrated into the natural progression of beginning lessons. If I can get the ball rolling early on in the lessons then the expectation of learning complete songs is always there.
Another thing that I try to push these days is the internalization of music. If you don’t know a song well enough to play without the sheet music, then you just don’t know the song well enough to play. In my own current music schooling as a Jazz Performance major I am required to have at least 50 jazz standards playable from memory by graduation. The idea is that I should be able to leave school and play a pickup gig in the style that I am studying without needing charts and if you can’t then you really aren’t able to play that style of music. I have to be able to read charts and there are always gigs where that is how we work, but you should have an established repertoire of music that you can play.
For young players or hobbyists, another reason that I give them for learning complete songs is not that they are expected to perform at a gig but that the point of playing music is…playing music. And through the process of putting together entire songs that you can play from memory, you are solidifying all of the skills that you struggle with in your lessons. Even better, if you are able to find other musicians around your skill level (or higher!) to play with the process will only accelerate your learning and skills as you learn to play songs together or have to put together enough music to play a gig. This is one of the reasons why I have taught performance classes for my students since the mid-1990’s, because it gives new players the opportunity to have that experience without needing to go through the pain of finding their own bandmates and floundering through jams and rehearsals without guidance.
Here is last nights live workshop:
