Rock & Roll 101

December 30th, 2024

Wren forgot his book, so we spent the time with drills on strumming and finding chords, and we also tried learning a few new chords: C7, G7, and E minor - but he may not be able to remember them. :)

December 16th, 2024

We went over Happy Birthday and Mary Had a Little Lamb, and added Jingle Bells.

We also reviewed his chords, and did some racing drills to see if he could up his speed on them. He's getting there!

December 9th, 2024

December 2nd, 2024

Wren is sick today and unable to attend lessons.

November 25th, 2024

Wren played through Happy Birthday with me a few times. He's still struggling a bit with switching chords, I'm wondering if he's pushing himself to play them faster at home?

We then added Mary Had a Little Lamb, in F. He liked this better because it doesn't have a G chord, but lots of future songs will have G, so he can't avoid it.

We then added a new chord, D - we ended with some strumming and chord speed drills.

November 18th, 2024

We went through the chords Wren has been learning, and then added G as a new one.

We drilled getting to the chord a few times, and then added the song Happy Birthday. It's a little challenging still because he needs to work on the G chord, but this will give him some motivation to learn it, if he's to play through the song.

November 4th, 2024

Wren will be missing today's lesson.

October 30th, 2024

This was an extra lesson for Wren.

We went through the strumming drill a few times, and some chord drills, first from his knee to the fretboard, and then from one chord to another. After that we added a new chord, "D minor."

October 28th, 2024

Today in Wren's lesson, we continued with strumming, trying to get his count up as high without making mistakes. He got as high as 12, but then made a mistake (I suspect he sabotaged the strum there because he said he made a mistake on purpose since he was tired of it).

We also learned a new chord, A, and did some racing between chords to get the length to switch as low as possible.

At the end we played the strumming pattern to switch between A minor and F.

October 21st, 2024

We reviewed the parts of the instrument to start.
We then went over the chords. A minor and C are learned so far. Sometimes Wren plays C in the wrong fret (the fourth instead of the third).
We added a new chord, F, and strummed it a few times.
We worked on our first strumming pattern: 1, 2, 3 and 4... down, down, down-up, down.
We tried to get that as a habit for strumming on time. We played a long with a slow drum beat to help with staying in time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhM_MJEB7e0&t=119s

We counted how many successive strum patterns he could do before making a mistake with which strums are up and which are down. He got as high as 6 times before mixing them up.

October 7th, 2024

Wren (not Drew, sorry!) ended up bringing a ukulele in today (I had thought he was playing drums, but either is fine!) I taught him the names of the parts of the ukulele and then two chords, C and A minor. We raced to get the chords as quickly as possible (he got down to about 1 second per chord). He sometimes forgets which fret to play in.

Have him work on that, and switch between the chords.