Giving Lessons

[John Zimm]

I have a question for experienced any mandolin instructors out there. Hopefully this is the place to post the question.

I've started to give lessons to my neighbor's daughter who is 7. I've never given lessons before, but we have a good book and I feel like I know enough and play thoughtfully enough to at least show her the basics.

My question is, how fast do you normally work though material when teaching a child? In lesson 1 I just showed her how to hold the mandolin and how to do the downstroke on the D and A strings without looking at her right hand. Lesson 2 I went through reading the e, f# and g notes on the D string. I'm wondering if this seems like overly-slow progress. My thought was first to get her practicing decent right-hand technique, then get her left hand used to fretting notes before doing scales and simple tunes.

Any constructive advice is greatly appreciated.

-John.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

I like to give people a tune to play right away, something to give them a reason to play and feed on their initial enthusiasm. It helps a lot to go with a melody that they already know--something they could sing from their head. For young kids, it may be Bingo Was His Name-O, You Are My Sunshine, This Old Man, Yankee Doodle, etc. (Just NOT Twinkle, Twinkle or Mary Had A Little.... ) The point is to find some relatively simple but genuine tune and show them how to play it. Even if you give them just the first half, or a few phrases (depending on their natural ability) at the first lesson, this will encourage them more than anything else.

You'll likely be correcting and refining their technique for many lessons to come, so focus on helping them just play the tune and answering their questions. This will require some semblance of good positioning and posture, etc., anyway, so it starts them down the right path. It also enables you to teach all sorts of "technical" skills and ideas while they think they're just learning to play a tune.

I make a point of asking every student what music *they* want to play, and then helping them learn that, rather than sticking to a book or pre-planned repertoire.

In my experience, people who learn music from teachers who share their sense of fun and enjoyment are the people who become lifelong, happy musicians. Share your sense of joy and enthusiasm for music and for the mandolin. It's contagious.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

P.S. Make sure she has a recording of the tune she can listen to and play along with. Have her parents bring a recording device, or do it yourself. Email an mp3 clip to her, whatever, just see that she has the aural music to interact with.

Along the same lines, I usually start kids on tablature rather than sheet music because it's more concrete and easy to link to the strings and frets on the mandolin. But the tab is just a memory aid, not how to teach the tune (just show her where to put her fingers). Giving her the recording will encourage her to use her *ears,* and the eyes (and tab) as a backup, not the other way around.

Teaching sheet music at the same time as teaching how to make sounds on your instrument is a bit like expecting a one yearold to start reading text while she's sounding out her first vowels and consonants. You have to establish the aural context first, then teach the abstract visual symbols.

Hope this helps.

[Bob Buckingham]

Well, she is young so you are on the right track. There is a Mel Bay book for children, Easy Mandolin Tunes for Children. Use a book like that after you get her playing all of the strings and feeling comfortable holding the mandolin. Tunes like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star will be good material for a youngster.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

Yikes. This is just my own bias, but please teach Twinkle Twinkle *only* if she asks for it or you can't find any other melodies she already has in her head.

You might find the Easy Mandolin Tunes for Children a good source of tunes to teach her, but no need to actually use the book at first. Just show her how to finger and pick the tunes. Give it a few weeks before you explain tab or music notation to her....

[Travis Finch]

For teaching simple tunes (to adults or children) you might try '65 Easy Tunes' from astute music. Loads of tunes that would be appropriate for a beginner. Check it out here (nfi):

http://www.astute-music.com/shop/pro...roducts_id=110

They also have some good stuff in the 'downloads' section.

As to the rate at which you progress, just keep an eye on your student and see how much they seem to be absorbing, let her lead the way at first. I'm sure you guys will hit your groove before you know it.

[MandoJam]

I usually start my students off with basic 2-finger chords. The C, G, and D chords are good ones to start with. To play songs, they need to learn chords and the G, C, and D chords are the I-IV-V chords in many songs. It always depends on the individual student though. Sometimes I do have to back track a little and have them play individual notes. If you are teaching them to read music from the start then individual notes are the way to go. I try to find some tunes that my students like and transpose them into an easy to play key and hopefully that will inspire them to practice more.

[Bob Buckingham]

A young child's musical base is not that of an adult. Teach them something they already know how to sing. You originally said this girl is 7. Has she been exposed to lots of music? You have to assess your students' awareness and go from there.

[abuteague]

The spongebob square pants theme song.

[AlanN]

Not sure why the aversion to Twinkle, Twinkle and Mary Had A...In my mind, these are perfect, as is Happy Birthday, Camptown Races, etc. This teaches and reinforces the 'play what you sing, sing what you play'. All of the great musicians do this...hum it, play it, hum it, play it.

Btw, Matt Glaser took Mary Had A Little Lamb and jazzed it up like nobody's business, I think an old Frets magazine has the score.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

My rant against Twinkle Twinkle and Mary Had a Little is that even young kids want to play what they perceive as "real" music, not something they can sense is meant to be "at their level." Seriously, when was the last time you heard either of those tunes on your car radio?

I've taught many kids over the years, and have yet to find one who doesn't wince at mention of Mary Had A Little Lamb. Yet they're thrilled to learn This Old Man, or Bingo Was His Name-O. And even better are equally simple tunes that don't carry any stigma, like Ode to Joy, You Are My Sunshine, the Doe-a-Deer song from Sound of Music, and so on.

The salient point is that it should be a melody that the student already has in his or her head. These days, I'm not at all averse to starting a kid out with Smoke on the Water or Iron Man or Sunshine of Your Love, on mandolin, guitar, or fiddle, if one of those melodies hits a nerve and motivates them to sit down and play every day till the next lesson. And it's utterly routine for kids as young as 6 and 7 to ask for that or the intro riff to Taylor Swift's "Fearless," or Ghost Riders in the Sky, or the intro fiddle break to Calling Baton Rouge or Cowgirls Don't Cry. An 8-year old came to me desperate to learn to play fiddle and begged for Seminole Wind. He could play the main theme tolerably well the next week, despite never having touched a fiddle before. I've used all of these as "rank beginner" tunes--they require no more technique than Twinkle Twinkle, *and* they're rewarding.

In one extreme case, a kid was overwhelmed with how awkward the bow felt. He seemed genuinely interested in learning fiddle, but hadn't expected the horsetail-tied-to-a-stick to be so uncontrollable. I ended up showing him how to play the two-note suspense bit from Jaws just so he had *something* to play that already had meaning to him. It was amazing to see how hard that kid worked on down and up bow strokes to get Jaws to sound just right.

You can teach technique and musicality using *any* music. But the best music is whatever inspired the person to want to learn in the first place. And there's always a suitably "easy" piece, in any genre.