Learning Theory of Guitar - Your Ears Are More Important Than Your Eyes

When new guitarists are learning theory of guitar I always try to get them to pay more attention to what they're doing with their ears and less with their eyes. Beginner guitarists are always straining their eyes to see the tablature notes on the page or on the screen (digital guitar tabs are very handy by the way).

I've always felt the best way for beginning guitarists to learn the theory of guitar is by teaching them along the way to intuitively hear the underlying theory without encumbering them with names and numbers to confuse them. I don't know how many times I've said to them... "it sounds like this" with my back turned to them so they can't see my fretboard. It frustrates them because they start out learning slower, but believe me they always leap ahead of the other teacher's students as a result.

Theory of Guitar - How I Teach it and How I Learned It
By Frank A Smith

My philosophy is to teach theory of guitar as an underlying theme when I'm writing lessons for students in my classes. Typically what I like to do is have an overall theme in mind, where I'm planning to teach a song or a part of a song but as we go through the lesson I have encourage the students to tease the theory of guitar out of the music.

This strategy has proved to work remarkably well as I find not only am I teaching the students about what I see in the underlying theory of guitar in the music, but I find they are teaching me as well - taking the lessons in new and wonderfully unpredictable directions. Someone long ago once told me the best way to learn is to teach... but I guess I had never really experienced it until recently.

A sample lesson I had put together was basically designed just to introduce a couple of chords and a really simple chord progression but before I knew it I had half the class playing the riff and the other half taking turns creating new lead solos over the riff using a pentatonic minor scale we had learned only a week prior. Getting the students to solo over the riff was an expected outcome of the two week learning plan. Where the lesson took an unusual turn was when one of the students started playing something totally unexpected.

My student began soloing in a totally different key, and it sounded really different, but in a good way. We took a moment to analyze the theory of guitar underlying what made the change in key still sound ok over our basic riff.

This little theory of guitar lesson in my class became the foundation of an entire new series of lessons. I found a similar lesson series on a DVD set which I previewed online. Now I use it as the foundation for all my teaching courses, with the theory of guitar always just under the surface for students to discover and explore. Click here and sign up for all the free video guitar lessons online.

Playing guitar is a lot of fun and creates valuable friendships. Watch the free guitar lessons online and get valuable insight into the theory of guitar and how to learn it and teach it. Frank A. Smith

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