I started teaching guitar to a kid

[Glacies]

I'm kind of insecure posting this in front of you guys who know infinitely more about the guitar than I do, but a good friend of mine moved to an island in Michigan which doesn't have a lot of resources for musical instruction. My friend asked me how I taught myself guitar without lessons, I told him books and youtube, you guys, etc. I then mentioned that some people give skype lessons, to which he told me "that's a good idea, when can you start?"

I was like "whoa dude, you don't want me shaping young minds"

but he talked me into it so I started with the kid last night. He's 12, wants to play bluegrass and folky stuff which is WAY outside my realm of music, I told them this, they said they didn't care. SO I started him with some open chords. I taught him a bit about the guitar and then hit the A, D and E chords. I told him to work on hitting those in time, 4/4 and make sure that each string is sounding in the chord. So next week I'll show him those are the chords needed for Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane"

I felt pretty good about the lesson afterwards. Not sure how I'm going to pull bluegrass. I don't even like bluegrass, but I suppose it's time to gain some musical maturity and try to understand how it works. First I want to get the kid comfortable on the guitar though while staying interested. Then we can get his style I think.

Wish me luck!

 

[deeaa]

Good luck!

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[Robert]

Congrats! Teaching guitar can be very rewarding.

 

[Tig]

Getting the ball rolling with the basics will certainly help the kid to get a good star.
Later he'll thank you by surpassing your skills and abilities (as well as many of us here)! :thwap

 

[Lev]

I've recently started teaching my 6 year old. She got a Squier mini strat last Christmas. Really she's a bit young to do too much with but she has a couple of basic chords down and I've come up with a couple of two note riff ideas so that she can play along to Taylor Swift.