The Guitar Takes Center Stage
For thousands of years, playing music was a family tradition. Babies were raised listening to guitar music, so learning to play the guitar was often an easy, natural process for them.
As a semi-retired local musician with over 50 years of experience, I was considering retiring from performing and focusing on teaching guitar. While searching the Internet for ideas on how to get started, I was shocked to discover how poorly new guitar students are being taught—how long it takes—and how much it costs.
Today, it seems the primary way to learn guitar is to focus on strumming chords. However, learning guitar by mindlessly strumming chords takes too long and quickly becomes so boring and frustrating that most people give up, hang their guitar on the wall, and never learn to play.
When I was first learning guitar back in the 1950s, I wanted to play Rock ‘n’ Roll songs. But the few people who knew how to play guitar only knew a handful of chords from country or jazz songs. Unfortunately, even those few wouldn’t teach anyone else—because they couldn’t read music and didn’t feel qualified.
Music teachers were no help either, because they didn’t like or understand Rock ‘n’ Roll. They believed it was contrary to everything that classical music stood for.
From the 1950s to the mid-1980s, tens of thousands of eager teens across North America wanted to learn guitar and become superstars. They all faced the same challenge: how to learn to play.
Professional guitar players wouldn’t teach because they couldn’t read music and didn’t feel qualified. Music teachers, on the other hand, didn’t like or understand Rock ‘n’ Roll; they only wanted to teach students how to read music, which takes a long time.
We know, from the explosive growth of the music industry during that period, that tens of thousands of teens did successfully learn guitar—even during a time when there were no computers, no internet, very few TVs, and limited music magazines. So, how did they do it? The answer: with only a radio and a record player to help them. They all had to teach themselves how to play guitar.
Using only scavenged information about chord structures—obtained from friends or the local library—they sat for hours listening to their favorite songs on a record player, trying to figure out what chords were being used and when chord changes happened.
Through this simple process of trial-and-error education, tens of thousands of teens taught themselves well enough to form countless local bands across North America, the UK, and other countries around the world.
They were so successful that their talent fueled the North American music industry for over 30 years. Today, their music remains more popular than ever. Over time, these teenage Rock ‘n’ Roll musicians grew up and joined all the other adults, who now make up about 50% of the North American population. This is great news for working musicians, because most adults dislike DJs and today’s disposable music.