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Quentin Watson
Past Notes
June 24th, 2014
Today I showed Quenten some of the fancier parts of the finger picking in this song. We went over it a number of times, and he expressed an interest in coming back in the some summer from time to time.
June 17th, 2014
Quentin came at a different time today, but we went through the song and talked about other songs he'd like to learn next.
His C chord is coming much faster, a week of real focus could make such a difference for him. :)
June 10th, 2014
I might have been a bit hard on Quentin tonight-- I told him it was important for me that he made the effort to practice. I said that sometimes when a student doesn't practice we have to look at whether or not we should keep teaching. He said he would commit to practising more.
June 3rd, 2014
Quentin and I worked on C most of the lesson, just trying to help him get used to putting his fingers on the chord as quickly as possible.
My intuition is that he loves the idea of playing the guitar, but doesn't want to take the time to learn the hard stuff. Just a few minutes a day can make a big difference. Focus on that C chord, and he'll find the rest of it will come much easier.
May 27th, 2014
Quentin wanted to learn the Hobbit song, "I see Fire." To get it, he needs to work on C, so we focused a lot today on this chord.
If he spends 5 minutes a day just playing this chord, he'll make big progress.
May 20th, 2014
Quentin and I did some timing games with the B minor chord to help him play it fast enough for the songs we're doing.
He's getting faster with the other chords, down to about 2 seconds with many of them. He should shoot for less than a second for each chord.
May 13th, 2014
Quentin and I worked on Down by the Bay, American Pie, and Scotland the Brave together as review.
Some points to remember: keep the fingers in the right fret boxes, sometimes they creep into the wrong places.
You get better leverage and a better sound if the fingers are closer to the bars as opposed to a long way from them (toward the hole of the guitar).
The slash represents one beat, along with the beat that the chord name holds, so this:
A / / /
is A for four beats.
G /
The above is G for two beats.
We also added a Green Day song, 21 Guns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR48iw41Ipw
May 6th, 2014
Quentin said he didn't practice much this week, but we worked on the strumming, and switching between the chords anyway. If he can spend a solid 10 minutes a day on this, he'll enjoy it so much more.
We played through American Pie at half-speed.
He's coming along well, and definitely has potential.
April 29th, 2014
Quentin and I reviewed the four strum patterns, and we mixed them together. I asked him to practice mixing them together, especially going from B to D, which he had some trouble with.
I added a new strum pattern and we worked on that for a while. He expressed an interest in American Pie by Don McLean, so I wrote out the chords to the main part of the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAsV5-Hv-7U
April 22nd, 2014
Quentin and I reviewed last week's chords, and he's doing great.
Then we added four strum patterns, and some new chord progressions. Then we reviewed down by the bay and he's going to work on all of this stuff this week.
April 15th, 2014
Quentin and I focused on the basic chords I wrote at the bottom: G for 8 measures, Eminor for 8 measures. We tried it with a couple of different drum loops on YouTube.com, so that he could get used to counting eight measures before switching. He got the hang of it after a while.
I tried to get him to work on D next, but his fingers were getting sore.
I recommend he keep the guitar out of its case so he's tempted to practice.
April 8th, 2014
Quentin and I went over the chords from the song Eastbound, but he had felt like it was too hard, so we moved on. We looked at a couple of others he liked, and settled on doing campfire songs for a while. The first, "Down by the Bay."
He should really focus on learning to play G and D quickly. When he is comfortable with those two, we'll add C.
April 1st, 2014
Today Quentin and I added some additional chords: he now knows Em, G, C, D, and A.
We added a new song by Jerry Reed, called East Bound and Down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHZJej98_T0
Next week be sure to bring the guitar, and your book for writing in.
March 25th, 2014
Today was Quentin's first day, and he didn't have a guitar with him, so we used my older guitar.
We went through the typical "first-lesson" material... the names of the various parts of the guitar, how to tune (I let him tune it), and E minor / G chords.
Next week, if he could bring a booklet that we can write songs and chords down in, as well as the guitar he will be practising on, that will make it easier to understand what his instrument is like etc.
He should try to play 15 minutes every day-- I recommend putting the guitar out of the case, next to the TV or computer, so that he can pick it up and noodle during commercials, etc.
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