New lesson idea

Teacher's Lounge
#1

In my own practice, when i practice scales, arpeggios and sequences i use alternate picking, economy and swybrid. I feel that trying stuff out in different ways is very beneficial, especially for improvisation.

My plan is to annotate the different approaches on most of my lesson material. The reason is that i want my students to approach technique as problemsolving rather than different objects.

Has anyone tried something like this?
Or does it sound like a confusing thing to do?
I feel it would make it easier, but on the other hand, i have spent a lot of time with all the technique involved, not all of my students have done that.

1 Like
#2

Edit: I wrote the below after a misread of your post, thinking you were referring only to material for scale/arpeggio practice. For other lesson material, see further down

If you’re making this stuff digitally, and sharing it digitally, there’s an easy solution:
Make a version that shows all approaches.
Copy that file a bunch of times.
In each copy, omit all except one.
Then you’ll have one for alt, one for swybrid, one for economy.
Have them ready, and then when you’re going over the stuff with your student, choose which to use based on where they’re at. If the notes themselves are tricky for them, it might overcomplicate things to have 3 different picking approaches on the same page. If the notes/left hand is comfortable for them and you’re focusing more on right hand approaches in that lesson, you can share the version that shows the comparison.

Similarly, this way if you have a student that has done a lot of alt picking but hasn’t heard of swybrid, you don’t have to open up a whole new topic just to show them a new scale.

edit:
so, for songs/riffs, I think it’s not worth having 3 different picking approaches on all sheets. I think it’s more sensible to only include whatever notation is relevant for what the student is working on. If you’re specifically making a point to compare different picking hand approaches, then it makes sense, but otherwise I think for each piece you and the student need to more or less settle on way of doing it, and then move from there.

In that respect it’s definitely more valuable for them to simply have a strong grasp of what those different picking hand approaches are, so they can choose to apply them without having to see picking notation for each note.

1 Like
#3

Oh, I may have expressed my view of the subject a bit unclear, I did not intend to write out all the approaches on the same sheets. I do agree with you that it would be confusing, even for me!

Something I have come to experience is that different things comes easy for different people. This has led me to believe that in certain cases it is a good thing to just show them all the approaches (that I know!) so they can try them out since music making is the ultimate goal. Having said that, I do not want to dilute the focus of the lessons either.

What is your approach to teaching technique in general?