The Perfect Method Book

It’s ironic (and I won’t say exactly why) that method books tend to be written by well-known performers and university teachers. They should of, course, be written by people who teach beginners.

Although I haven’t taught beginning students for over 25 years, at one time I taught an awful lot of them  in the Liverpool private schools. 30-40 each week. To be honest, I don’t remember too much about it. But I do remember that the teaching materials available at that time didn’t seem to work terribly well and that each student had his or her own learning style, skill set, personality and reasons for wanting to learn the instrument.

Clearly, it’s impossible to write the perfect method book. Let’s say, arbitrarily, that there exists 4 learning styles, 4 skill sets, 4 personality types and 4 reasons for desiring to learn the guitar. This amounts already to 64 definable types of student. Add teacher-types to this—self-teachers, specialist classical guitar teachers, all-round guitar teachers, non-guitarist music teachers—and we begin to see the size of the problem.

Myriad, hypothetical, tailor-made method books are, of course, being created daily—by those who spend their teaching hours with beginning guitarists. But they are not written down and published. This, as it turns out, is currently my job—to combine, balance and condense all of this diversity into a meaningful, engaging, motivating, sequential stream of good, usable pedagogical information.

It’s impossible to write the perfect method book…

SY