Zachary H.

When teaching guitar, I definitely like to insert basic music theory into my lessons. I feel like a basic understanding of music theory helps a student understand the relationships of chords and scales better, so that they can more effectively use them. When starting out, I usually teach what I call foundation chords, like C, D, G, Emaj/Emin, Amaj/Amin, because it isn't the most daunting task for a beginning guitar player, and once they get them down they can play some of their favorite songs, which I have found to always light a fire in the student. Moving forward I again like to focus on what the student wants to learn. I also feel like a lot of guitar instruction is geared towards getting the student to play the fastest and the most precise. This is not my goal. Instead, my goal is to help the student find their own unique voice through the instrument.

Starting out, it is crucial to practice good technique so that it becomes muscle memory. If technique is not focused on, then bad habits will develop that could harm the vocal chords in the long run. It happened to me as a young teenager taking vocal lessons, and I definitely learned a crucial lesson of how important proper technique is. I always start out with breathing exercises and techniques, to make suree student is breathing correctly and effectively. In addition to warm-ups and vocal exercises, I like to focus on music that the student wants to learn. AlsAlso,a student writes original music, I like to delve into that pretty heavily, so that they can present their work in the most healthy and powerful way possible. From time to time I will assign a song of my choice to a student to give them a certain challenge. It could be something that is way out of their preferred genre, or a song that I feel would help strengthen a noticeable weak spot of a student.

I studied songwriting intensively at college for 4 years. It is probably the facet of music that I have the most information and knowledge about. With younger students, I like to let them to create whatever they want, and then try to work off of what the come up with to try to introduce the concepts and techniques of songwriting. Once students have basic understanding I start to introduce different song forms, and their utilization for different stories and ideas. Then we move on to tools that are used to make a song stronger such as rhyme scheme, rhythm variation in melody and harmony, line length, phrasing, and much more. Once a student is further along I like to start presenting more complex challenges like writing a song from an image, or writing a song for a particular artist, or writing a song from another person's ideas.