First Guitar Lesson

It’s been a long time since I got in the car and drove anywhere except the local supermarket or Richmond. I choose one of the hotter days of the year to do it, and there were works on a road which is notorious for not moving very quickly at the best of times. I made it to the tutor’s place about fifteen minutes late. Fortunately his schedule was not rammed.

We had an introductory chat, and he made approving noises about my Epiphone Les Paul - it does look good. I plugged into a solid-state Marshall (which had a far better clean tone at conversational volumes than my Katana) and we set off on Samba Pa Ti. We had settled on it during our back-and-forth of messages.

This is the first time in many, many years another person has been in the room while I played.

There are many reasons for having a tutor, and many more lessons to be learned than which notes go in what order. Some background: classical music has definitive scores because composers wrote what they wanted playing. The score is the music, all the rest is interpretation. Jazz, rock, folk and most everything else by contrast does not even have a definitive recording. There’s the album version, the version on the later release of out-takes, four versions on You Tube, and the legendary version they played at the (insert name of concert hall here). Very often in these genres there is no sheet music, and if there is, it can be unreliable. So even today, if you want to learn a song, sure look for the sheet music, but you may well find a good recording and learn from that. It’s what the younger jazz players did in the 1950’s.

If you have perfect pitch or a well-trained ear, and an amount of patience. My tutor has a well-trained ear. I made a note to get back to doing ear training.

There are other things as well. Until then I had only suspected that the chords in pop-music sheet music were… ummm… directional. My tutor was quite clear that the scores and tab charts available on the big-name sites such as Ultimate Guitar had enough errors to be an actual waste of time. (I rather like the look of the regular notation on MuseScore, and they are having a June Sale. I may do that.)

Teachers today are very different from they were when I was a pupil. They go in for making encouraging remarks, instead of saving the grudging praise for Christmas. Mine was no different. At the end he told me I was (by the standard of the pupils he has, granted) a “good guitarist”. I’m going to interpret that as meaning that my technique and knowledge of theory is enough for rock ‘n roll. (Which actually has quite high standards these days.) Which I will take as meaning I should concentrate on the music, rather than learning yet more scales or chords.

I came away with four bits of homework: unison bends; ear training; using my third finger to make a barre in the middle of the fretboard; polishing Samba Pa Ti.

The next lesson is booked in.