Guitar Lessons 101: Cheena Pop

Delivered my first guitar lesson to pigmei yesterday and I was immensely happy and satisfied with her progress.

I decided to tackle this lessons from a classical musician point of view because I personally am a strong advocate of classical basics combined with modern music as much of today's pop songs are based on classical theory anyway.

So started off with teaching chord triads and key signatures. Those simple stuff is only a matter of memory work and I guess after getting used to it, there won't even be a need to memorize it. After that moved on to chord progression and of course I started off with my favourite chord progression sequence, the almighty Circle of 5ths.

I refused to blatantly vomit out chords of songs she wanted to learn because I feel that with the full understanding of chord progression theory the learn process will be exponential so even though things seem very hard and slow now and you finish a lessons without learn a single song, after you have fully mastered the progressions, you will be able learn almost any cheena pop songs you want.

After teaching chord progression I realized that it would not be possible for her to further figure out other stuff at home if she didn't know how to play the chords so I had to move on and teach her the 6 strings and 5 strings bar chord shapes. I can't remember which of the CAGED shapes are they already. Darn!! So with that, she could play any diatonic major and minor chords of the chromatic scale.

Challenged my very brilliant student to begin TRANSPOSITION!! Yes.. amazing. I simply gave her roman numerals chord and she figured out everything and slowly was able to play Secret on C major and G major and I figured out that was enough for the day. A lot of things to process and pigmei had done very very well.

I'm very glad for her that she has this opportunity to learn all these things. Took me more than 3 years since I first started to play the guitar to figure out the link between classical theory and modern music myself through sheer coincidence and trial and error and luck and this for me is still an ongoing process and she gets to learn almost everything in one day.

Personally, I've been always reluctant to teach people because I know that with my temper, I would most likely end up shouting and scolding my student, but yesterday went better than I expected. The only thing I am worried about is that she might because stuck like me in this classical conservative theory box and be unable to get out of it which kinda limits a person's creative expressions. I don't know how much of yesterday did pigmei managed to absorbed but I'm always around to re-teach and ask questions.

Yay. So I guess I've this career option as a guitar theory teacher teaching Cheena Pop.

Anyway, I'm going off for CHMA already. More about CHMA later.

As always, here's a video of another old growing up boy band that I found.
Check out Madison Square Garden man, the number of people watching this concert is mind- blowing. I swear to myself, one day its going to be me on that stage. With hundreds of thousands of fans screaming at everything you do.

Here is N Sync with I Drive Myself Crazy