Why online guitar lessons?

You may think that one-to-one guitar lessons would be best in person however there are a number of advantages to online guitar lessons. One of the most significant from my perspective as a tutor is the ease with which I can thoroughly demonstrate certain aspects of both left and right hand technique with different cameras and close-ups. Being online also makes it very simple to share any digital content with students, be it sheet music, backing tracks and other audio, or even sharing my screen to better explain music software programs such as Guitar Pro or Digital Audio Workstations such as Logic Pro. Perhaps the greatest advantage of online guitar lessons though is that students are free to record as much of their lessons as they would like. Zoom and Skype have simple in-built recording functions whereby students can hit record and they will then immediately have a file saved to their hard drive of whatever portion of the lesson they chose to record. Sometimes it’s difficult for students to remember all the finer pointers on technique and style that can be covered over the course of one lesson so it’s a huge benefit to be able to refer back to these at a later date.

A closer look at grage pieces

Fire and Rain by James Taylor

This particular arrangement of ‘Fire and Rain’ by James Taylor is one of the Grade 5 pieces from the Rockschool Acoustic Guitar Syllabus. It’s a fantastic folk-rock song which relies heavily on good right hand fingerpicking technique. One of the most common mistakes I see students making is with their right hand positioning, namely that their hand is at more of a sideways angle when you want to try to have your fingers pointing downwards as much as possible. It’s important that your thumb is the furthest forward towards the fretboard so that your thumb and index finger don’t end up getting in each other’s way when playing on adjacent strings. There are often exceptions but a good rule of thumb (no pun intended) to start off with when playing finger-style pieces such as this one is that our thumb of our right hand plays the bottom 3 strings (low E, A and D strings) and we assign our index finger to the G string, middle finger to the B string and ring finger to the top E string.

Electric Guitar Study Piece

Castles made of sand by jimi hendrix

This Hendrix song has some of my favourite guitar parts of his entire back catalogue. The first shapes we see use his characteristic thumb over the top technique which his fretting hand, something which admittedly students will have varying levels of difficulty with only depending on the size of their hands! I’d suggest taking things slowly and starting off just trying to get the first shape to sound clean, then try sliding it forward two frets, then backwards two frets, then go for the 3 fret slide. Something I would say is it’s not the end of the world if you feel you’re not having the slide be super clear on the low E string that your thumb is fretting - as long as your thumb lands where it should after the slide decently enough that you can hear the note it’s fretting you should be ok. After this we’re into more classic Hendrix territory with double stops galore and some hammer-ons/pull-offs and more slides. A tip I’d give her is really listen out for or pay attention to which double stops we want to let ring (even if only for a quaver) compared to those being played more staccato and short - look for this in the notation part where there is a small dot underneath certain notes, indicating they are to be played staccato.