My Teaching Style

30 years ago, if you went to a teacher to learn banjo, he'd give you the tab to Cripple Creek, send you home with it, you'd muddle through it, come back in a week, and he'd critique. It probably won't come as much of a surprise that Earl Scruggs didn't learn this way.

Music comes to us through the ears, not through the eyes. Yet, we come to learning an instrument with a lifetime's experience in learning almost everything from Algebra to how to install a window air conditioner from paper, right to left, top to bottom. It's how we get through the educational system. Many folks think that it is the only way they can learn. My experience is that it not only presents about the worst way to play an instrument, but also about the most difficult. (My views on tablature)

By the time we get to adulthood, we have this set of abilities and dissabilities drummed into us from our experiences. "I can't sing" or "I have a tin ear" or "I'm tone deaf" are labels we've assumed about ourselves based on some bad experience in 5th grade choir. It is my opinion that everyone has the ability to hear pitch. It's just not been exercised in many of us.

My style of teaching revolved mostly around "watch, listen, and repeat". Most of my students go out and buy an inexpensive digital voice recorder, like this, for the purpose of recording the lesson so that they can jog their memory using their ears (and not paper) when they get home.

Having said all this, if you simply must jot down a series of right hand notes, or left hand fret numbers, I won't stop you, of course. I will simply ask that you use it to jog your memory, not to refer to. When tablature becomes a reference, you are no longer playing music, but "reading" it. This music developed in a part of the country where the folks may or may not have been able to read or write English, much less read music. I will teach you to learn to trust your ear.