Meet JERRY SNYDER
Jerry Snyder is a guitarist, author, teacher, and clinician. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in music from San Jose State University. At the present time, Jerry is the Performing Arts Coordinator for the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, California (10 high schools and 22,000 students). He also teaches a guitar class and directs the orchestra, symphonic band, and jazz ensemble at Piedmont Hills High School.
Jerry is a pioneer in developing guitar classes for the public schools. His phenomenal success in this endeavor led to a demand for Jerry as a clinician and literally propelled him into the music publishing field. He has given over 200 clinics and guitar seminars in the United States and Canada, and has been a frequent guest instructor at colleges and universities. The Comprehensive Guitar Method (Belwin/Mills, 1971) was the first book ever written for the guitar class and school music teacher. From 1972-78, Jerry was the guitar editor for Hansen Publications, where he wrote and arranged over 100 guitar publications and helped develop a strong guitar catalog for Hansen by bringing in new writers. He spent an additional seven years as a free lance writer before returning to teaching in 1987. In 1987, Jerry developed a new guitar course called Guitar Today (Alfred Publications, Inc.), which deals with the chord progressions, pick, and finger styles used in today's music. Jerry's books have sold over 1,500,000 copies and several of his methods are sold in Spanish and Japanese translations. His books are now available from Alfred Publications and Warner Brothers. Click here to see and hear Peaceful Feeling from Guitar Today, Vol. I. Click here to see and hear Blues for Bobbie from Guitar Today, Vol. II.
Jerry has been an active guitarist in the south bay, performing with the San Jose Symphony, San Jose Music Theater, Plum Forrest Jazz Band, and various name artists who perform at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts or Flint Music Center. He continues to play with the San Jose Symphony, with Gatos (a flute and guitar duo), and as a soloist. CMEA caught up with Jerry at his home in Monte Sereno.
INTERVIEW WITH JERRY SNYDER
CMEA: You have had an active career in the publishing business, and yet you have spent most of your career teaching in the public schools. Why have you continued to work as a teacher?
JS: Well, the books were only possible because I taught. So the writing is an extension of the teaching. I don't think I could have ever written a book if I hadn't learned how to teach. Teaching an instrument and taking somebody from point A to point B is just something you've got to experience first hand. Once you do that, you write your books in such a way that you're always thinking of what technique will now be possible. You're constantly preparing the students to go from one thing to another. There's nothing more frustrating than to get a book, turn the page, and then suddenly you say, "Wow, what happened? I was doing great... Did I miss a page or something? Why is this impossible to play?"
I think teaching kids in school gives you a really strong sense of sequence and what is possible. And then I think you also try to build in your teaching (and I try to do this in my books) an option for the kid who immediately says, "Oh yeah, I get it." He's ready to flip ten pages ahead or get something more challenging right away. I try to put something in there that allows that to happen. So sometimes in my books, I'll put in a challenge page or something that some kids will say "whoa, I'm not ready for that..." while others will jump on it.
CMEA: One of the things that you're noted for was starting large group guitar classes in the public schools. How did that come about?
JS: That came about in kind of an interesting way. I was asked one day to substitute for an evening adult education class that Rudy Foglia was teaching at San Jose High School. I walked into the music room and there were 90 people strumming on guitars, and I thought "What is going on here?" They were having a great time playing all these songs -- mainly chords, strumming, and different techniques -- and when I got back to school, I was thinking about how that might work in a high school situation. I talked to my associate principal and he said "Well, it's too late in the year to get a new guitar class curriculum approved, but we could offer it as 'music theory - guitar'. We could teach music theory through the guitar and we could get on the books and do it that way."
That was in the spring of 1968, and we offered the class, and 75 kids signed up. Soon we had three sections of guitar in the fall of '68. The only part of the adult education class that I was interested in adding was getting the kids into more note reading experiences. The guitar classes started at Piedmont Hills in 1968. Tom Gaudio, my colleague, taught one of the guitar classes and I taught two of them.
My main interest was to broaden the offerings in music to kids. I wanted more students involved in music at the high school level. If you performed or you were a singer, there was a class for you. So I was looking for a way to expand music. I tried an "Art and Music Survey class" -- team taught -- and introduced a "Music in the Humanities" class. While they were successful, they still had limited appeal. The guitar classes brought the kids out in large numbers. We had seven high schools in our district. The other teachers would say "What's going on at Piedmont Hills?" The word was getting around. That summer, I was hired by the district to train the rest of the teachers how to teach those guitar classes. And guitar went into every high school in 1969. It enabled us to hire a second music teacher at every high school because of all these sections of guitar that we were adding. We started it to give kids a hands-on method to experience music, as opposed to experiencing music via playing recorded examples or talking about music. With the guitar class, they could learn harmony by experiencing it.
CMEA: Is that program still in existence? Or did it get hit by Proposition 13?
JS: The guitar program is still in existence. There are seven guitar classes in the district right now. There seemed to be a resurgence of guitar coming back into the schools. I noticed when I came back into teaching in 1985 that the situation had changed. Music for the guitar had become more instrumental in concept. There weren't a lot of simple songs that everybody could sing. Guitar music used complex chords, and we didn't have Peter, Paul and Mary, Glenn Campbell, Neil Diamond, John Denver, or Bob Dylan writing simple songs like they did in the 60's and 70's.
More of the music was instrumental, and I noticed that the classes were 95% boys. So I wrote a new method called Guitar Today from my observation of what the needs were. I based the new method more on an instrumental approach to the guitar with less emphasis on accompaniment and singing songs. Now I'm seeing my classes are almost 50% girls. The girls are coming back into the class. Some of the kids are singing at a coffee house. It seems like it's all happening again.
The guitar never went out, but keyboards became the most popular instrument in the 1980's and early 1990's. We had over thirty sections of keyboard, and we still have about 22 in the district at the present time. But the guitar is making its comeback. And there really is a big need out there to clinic teachers and give them the skills, because the colleges never really trained the teachers. They responded a little bit, but the teachers don't feel very confident about teaching the guitar.
CMEA: I know at San Jose State and other state universities that train music teachers, we never had a mandatory guitar class as part of our preparation, just classes in orchestra and band instruments.
JS: The guitar just conjures up a problem with a lot of teachers. They feel they don't play guitar, so they can't teach it. But all of us can play a lot of instruments. A lot we don't play very well, but we know the basics. So, when I give workshops for teachers, (I've given over 200 workshops/clinics around the country) I emphasize the classical guitar right-hand finger-style technique, that can be applied to jazz, folk styles, strumming, and I also teach them pick style.
We need to look at what's going on in the real world. There is a new playing technique that merges finger style and pick style. There is no problem selling the kids on learning both styles because there are so many examples of good music that they like and popular artists out there who use both styles.
CMEA: Could you elaborate on the style difference a little bit more?
JS: Well, I think basic guitar might be described as learning chords that have open strings voicings that involve fewer fingers to put down and that avoid using the fourth finger which is a problem for beginners. So you learn open chord positions first. These kinds of chords lend themselves to accompanying songs.
Students also need to learn how to play a lead line -- a single note melody. Students generally learn the first position on the guitar, and they will learn to play one note at time. That's a basic bit of knowledge that will apply no matter where they want to go with it. They might want to pick out the melody of a song, play classical guitar, or play a lead line in a jazz ensemble. After you expose students to lead line playing, learning basic chords is next. Then you begin to show them how chords can be extended; for example how a D chord can become a D major 7 or a D6. Next you show them some basic substitutions. Finally you begin to teach them movable chords, which really opens up their playing -- they get a lot for their money if they can play movable chords, some form of the bar chords. This gets them into rhythm guitar, which is going to be what they need to do if they are going to play in a jazz ensemble. They need to know extended and altered type of chords.
A third component of basic style would be to introduce scales, get them working on scales, and sell them on the idea of their value as a means of improvisation. Show them blues scales and major scales, and how the modes can be used to play against scales -- how scales are the horizontal expression of the vertical chord. That gets a lot of kids excited about being the composer or the improviser.
The guitar is at home in a variety of styles. It is the most popular instrument in the world. The guitar just lends itself to all kinds of popular, classical, and Latin styles of music. There are just so many wonderful players doing major things.
CMEA: If I was a young guitar player, and interested in getting started, or becoming more involved in the business, what advice would you give me? What do I need to know these days? It used to be that if you were a popular song writer, you could basically jam a few chords and figure out a tune, and if you could sing, you could put together material for an album, and then everything else was handled for you. But that doesn't seem to be the case any more these days with so much competition and the fact that the music industry has changed quite a bit. A lot of the production work comes from independents -- people that are producing their own compact disks and things like that. What kind of preparation would I need to have if I was going to be involved with this as a guitar player.
JS: I think being versatile would be a good way to approach the guitar. The more versatile you are, the more possible situations where you could make some money at it might pop up. If you can play a variety of styles you will be able to work. The full time musicians that I know who play guitar might be playing a jazz band one weekend, and a salsa band another night, or they might be playing at a wedding during the day. If they learn how to play bass or sing vocals, that opens up some additional doors. If you're going to specialize in classical guitar, then you need to find a teacher you can work with and really focus in on that. I've got some students that have gone into flamenco guitar, and they've found some good teachers, and they're really pursuing that.
Finding a good teacher privately in the style that you want to pursue is important. You may have to go to several different teachers to learn different things, because it's not always one person that's going to know everything. You shop around and keep adding to your skills.
CMEA: What if I just wanted to be a rock guitar player?
JS: Rock guitar, a lot of that I think comes from getting really excited about some group that you want to emulate. That's probably where it starts. Then you get into power chords and you get into the rock scale. You begin to write some things yourself and it might, after a point, tend to get repetitious to you and you might start to want to investigate more complex chord structures or chord progressions.
But if you are going to be a rock player today, you should work on technique -- a lot of the rock players have fantastic techniques -- they know how to get around lead-line-wise and hammering-on-wise, tapping. There are just so many techniques that they can get into -- sweeping; they really need to study how to do that, and tapping with their right hand while playing with their left hand seems to be style that players can get into. There are some unique techniques that they use. You need to know how to set-up your guitar. It has got to be set up completely differently from a jazz guitar. The action has got to be low, the gauge of the strings has to be lighter, just your total set up -- the amplifier, how you're going to set up your amp, you need to learn about the effects you might want to incorporate, fuzz tones, delays, reverb, and distortions. There's just a whole bunch of stuff going on for the rock guitarist.
CMEA: Coinciding with that, there's been a real great resurgence of blues guitar in this country. It's gotten much stronger that I ever remember it being, and there's a lot more interest in that. What about somebody who is interested in learning the blues style?
JS: I had an opportunity to do a book with B. B. King. I interviewed him back in 1978 and put a book together with him. In order to interview him, I had to do my homework. So I did a lot of listening and really got into his music and he told me "you got inside my head." I had good questions for him. I still have all the cassettes of all that interview , and the book I put together. I think what I learned from him is that the blues is a lot of different things. It's not sad, necessarily, it's not always a tragedy or anything. It's a definite style; it's a definite feeling. There's a lot of musical pathos -- just a lot of musical expression. There are certain things that you do in the blues style where you bend the strings. Like a jazz musician may play a flat third, but a blues guitarist will bend to some of these intervals -- will bend the strings up. And sometimes you'll purposely just kind of get in the crack, like a singer. So there's those kinds of techniques, and there's an extensive use of the blues scale in various songs and singing is a big important part of it.
CMEA: Let's talk a little bit about notation and guitar. This has always been a controversial subject in some ways. Some guitarists come up and say, "Well, I just refuse to do anything but read tablature" and you say "But you really need to learn how to read notes so you can communicate with the rest of the music world." And other people say "I don't want to even deal with that. I want to be on the level of musical communication where I don't need notation." So where do you stand on this issue? Where do you think things are going?
JS: Well, I think a guitar player needs to know every system that exists out there for guitar notation. Tablature has a history that if you play lute, you're still dealing with a system of tablature called cifra. It tells you exactly where on the guitar to play something. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain the rhythmic elements of a song. Some publishers have desperately tried to put some rhythm above it. There was a series of books that came out using this idea that were somewhat helpful. A lot of the tab today puts the regular music notation above the tab, and I think most of the people who use tab, come to it with either a recording that they have in mind, or they have the sound, and they're just looking for where to play it on the guitar. I introduced tab as a system of notation, but then I point out that it has serious limitations. If you aren't familiar with the song, you're just going to have a heck of a time figuring it out.
Unless you know a little bit about the rhythm of the song, it's impossible to include right hand techniques in it. So I bring the kids back to the realization that standard notation has got to be part of their knowledge and they at least need to be able understand all the various note rhythms and at least be able to play the notes in first position.
The guitar has a unique problem, well not totally unique because string players have this situation also, but a trumpet play can play G on the second line pretty much one way. Whereas a guitar player can play that note in four different places. So, this makes it confusing for guitar players. If you have something really complex, you've got to consider the position you might want to play it in -- the left hand fingering. So you can't really become a great sight reader on chord solos. You can get pretty good at reading single lines.
Anyway, I think all musicians need to read music, guitar players need to be familiar with all of the different styles. They need to know when they pick up a jazz chart that probably the guy who wrote the arrangement is clueless about what the guitar player is suppose to do, and you have to fix things all the time. So you need to be a musician, you need to play chord voicings that resolve correctly, yet be out of the way of the bass player. You're dealing with that notation which is more interpretive. It's like the drummer in a jazz band -- if you played what was on the chart, it would be so square. So you've got to be an interpretive musician.
But then, like all musicians, you've got to be a good ear player. You've got to be grooving with the rhythm section in a band. So you've got to be listening. You should be a person who can improvise and take a solo. I think even symphony musicians should be able to play by ear and improvise at some point. You can't just be note bound. I think you're a better musician if you can play by ear as well as play by note.
Both an advantage and a disadvantage is the fact that the guitar lends itself to improvisation in many styles: folk, jazz, rock, blues, etc. There are sounds you can create on the guitar that standard music notation is limited to create. The advantage is that guitarists become creative in playing the guitar "by ear". The disadvantage is that many guitarists never get very good at reading music. Of course, classical guitarists must work on these skills. Everyone needs to be able to read a lead line.
CMEA: Maybe you could talk about that a little bit more. For instance, in keyboard, we're doing a lot of the same things but we get two staves for notation. If you look at classical guitar notation, especially, it's very difficult to read because you're trying to do everything in one clef and one staff. Has there been any movement to change that or is it a tradition too hard to fight in music?
JS: There was a person named Johnny Smith who published his method in treble and bass clef. Guitar notation is a transposing notation. The E on the fourth space of the treble clef sounds an octave below. But Johnny Smith said the guitar should be written on the bass clef. It should spill over to the treble clef; it should be like a piano. So he has written a method about that, but it never caught on. Nobody else has jumped on the band wagon. All of the music that I normally see is notated on the treble clef sounding an octave lower.
CMEA: Are most writers pretty careful about that? From time to time, you'll see guitar parts clearly written in the wrong octave, just more convenience than anything else, I guess.
JS: Well, when you get to a lot of ledger lines, an easier way to notate would be to write in the lower octave and then mark it "8va higher". The guitar player should be expected to play anything in any octave. That's one of the skills you try to make students aware of -- you should be able to transpose anything an octave above or an octave below. The other thing, when I started working as a guitar editor for Hansen Publications in 1971, I noticed there was a big discrepancy in the way even classical guitar music is written. For instance, just in writing stem directions -- it's very inaccurate when you see an arpeggiated type of figure, implying that we let all the notes ring, but it's not written that way. It looks like you're going "do-mi-sol-mi-do" and it's suppose to be all be ringing, There's a way to write it to make it look like that, but it can get so busy looking, with ties and everything. And there are other times when a rest means stop the bass note from ringing. There are Segovia studies that, you know, they're not correct if you let the bass note continue to ring and give a fourth beat, when it should be stopped with the thumb. Some of those things, you just don't know until you go study with a good teacher.
CMEA: You said that a guitarist who is aspiring to the business should be able to read notation and should understand tab. What are some of the other musical training skills that are very important? If I wanted to be a professional guitar player, what else do I have to know? Do I need to go to college and get a degree or can I learn through experience? Didn't most of the guitar players that made it in the professional world just go out and get gigs and learn that way?
JS: Well there are a lot of places where guitarists can go and major in guitar. Back in 1968, when I first introduced the guitar in the high school, the Peabody Institute was about the only place you could be a guitar major. Classes on the guitar were available here and there, but very limited.
Now there are guitar majors offered all over the place. The emphasis at the university seems to be on the classical guitar. There's a graduate of San Jose State here, Daniel Roest, he's a classical guitarist, and he's a very sought after soloist and works with duos, plays all the time. He's also involved with South Bay Classical Guitar Society. He learned not only his guitar ability, but learned marketing skills, how to market himself, how to open up the doors. He needed to be able to get an audition tape together and portfolio showing what he could do, and start marketing himself.
There are places like the Berklee School of Music in Boston where there are 600 guitar majors, and one wonders what they're all going to be doing. A lot of them come back to the Bay Area and they're playing shows or teaching privately. Some of them work at other occupations, doing something else that can make them very good money, but are still keeping their feet wet in the guitar world.
CMEA: So, in other words, you think it's important, that somewhere along the line, a young guitarist gets some training in some business skills -- marketing, developing portfolios, maybe learning how to record something.
JS: I think all those skills will help. He also needs a knowledge of song writing, copyright laws, and recording skills. I think a musician these days needs to be able to pursue playing, writing, teaching, and recording; just be knowledgeable about all these things. If you're a super star, you can afford to just play. But there aren't that many people that just can rely on their ability to play. You need to be able to do other things too.
CMEA: Let's get back to some things about your own career. How did you find the time to balance the demands of publishing, getting gigs, with the demands of a teacher? How do you find the time to schedule all of this stuff without one suffering as a result of the other?
JS: Well, I don't know where you want me to start on that. The present time? What's going on now? Okay, well in the present time, I'm a teacher for four periods and I'm the Performing Arts coordinator for the high school district. I get a whole period to do that. (laughs) So, my job between September and June is the teaching job and the coordinating job.
During the school year, if the San Jose Symphony needs me to come in for a performance, I do that. I play a few solo, duo, and trio jobs here and there. If time permits, I like to do those things. But most of the time, something going on at school. So school is the number one thing. During the summer is when I have the time to do some writing. Maybe during the year, I'll get the project going on the weekends -- kind of think about what it is I'm going to have time to do and kind of outline it -- and then when the end of the school year comes, I'll jump into the project. It kind of depends on what the project is. Sometimes I can do some of it during school year if it's an arranging project. I did a book on classical guitar and a book on wedding music for the guitars; these were projects that I could just work on now and then.
But my first job is the teaching job, and second is getting the publishing projects out. Then I like to get out there and experience what it feels like to be a gigging musician, working under a conductor, or playing in a group. It keeps me buying equipment or updating, just keeping up with what's going on out there. One kind of compliments the other, because I can take the experiences I have in my playing back to school and share those with the kids, and I can tell them about the other kinds of opportunities that are open to them in music.
For instance, after going to the National Association of Music Merchants convention, I can come back and tell students about all the people that are a success now, and not necessarily as players, but all the other things that they come up with. How Ernie Ball, for instance, decided it's ridiculous that you couldn't buy a second string - you had to buy a complete set of strings. So he started his business by making strings available separately in different gauges. Now he's got Music Man, and sells all kinds of guitar equipment. So there's always somebody that just sees a need because he's experienced it as a musician. "Why can't I buy a second string?" All of a sudden, he responds to that need, and he's a businessman.
I tell the students there are a lot of music related jobs out there that are interesting. I have a guitar student who was a music major at San Jose State, and he's now working for a computer company that's doing things with Silicon Graphics. His job is recording commercials, working with companies at conventions, and putting together multi-media presentations. Because of his background in music, all of his experience in gigging, and his composing ability, he got himself a real good job. So I think musicians should be really on top of the technology thing. They should know MIDI and all the guitar players need to get into improvements in guitar synthesizers and things like that. They need to know the new technology; it could open up a lot of doors.
CMEA: I'd like to follow up on technology. A lot of guitar players have complained about using guitars to input MIDI data. Do you think it's good for a guitar player to play keyboard also?
JS: I bought a guitar synthesizer that's made in Australia. It was the best thing on the market at the time. I think there are new improvements now. I haven't really found that I use it that much. I tend to go back to laying down guitar tracks on my tape recorder, a bass track and then going back to the jazz band to make an improvisation tape. I do it the old fashioned way. The disadvantage being that I can't change the recording to any tempo. I usually record a fast and slow version.
A keyboard background is good for anybody on any instrument. To have some knowledge of the keyboard is really important, I think. The delay on the guitar synthesizer has been the main thing. You strike a string and there would be a delay. They have improved that. I'm not really on top of or could recommend what's the best one out there yet. The guitar is now able to do some MIDI stuff in real time without the delay thing. Try out products and see what you think. Check out the Roland guitar synthesizer.
CMEA: So you think something eventually will become the industry standard, but is not really there yet?
JS: Not really there yet.
CMEA: What advice would you give to school music teachers about the guitar. For instance, I have a situation where I have a guitar player in my jazz band, and I'll say "Don't you know what this chord is?" and we can look it up in the chord book, but it has nothing to do with what should really be played. I look at these jazz band charts, and even the simpler ones have really tough guitar parts.
JS: Probably the best advise you could give a student would be to thin out the chord. You've got to, in a lot of cases, play non-root versions of the chords. You've got to lose a sixth string almost all the time. On the guitar, say from fret 1 to 5, you probably can play a lot of good sounding voicings for rhythm guitar on the first four strings. When you get from the fifth fret on up, you probably do not want the high first string sounding, and you're going to play voicings that fit on the fifth, fourth, third, and second strings, avoiding the first and sixth strings.
You can even play three string chords on, say, the fifth fret on up, where you just play the second third and fourth string. Less is better. You need to go for the sound of the chord and a lot of times, a guitar player can play the upper part of the chord, leave out the root. Get out of the way of the bass player; the bass player will love you for getting out of his way.
There are too many books that present all ten-thousand-and-one chords, and really, you need a book that shows you how the chords work, and how to resolve them from one or the other. When I was the editor for Hansen, I met Warren Nunes, a great jazz guitarist. We worked together, and we did a book called Rhythm and Background Chords. He's gone ahead and done some books called Comp Chords. The main thing is learning how to use these chords, and to use different types of chords for a jazz band then you would for when you're the only chord instrument in a band.
I think you just tell kids about getting off the lower strings, and try to play in a range or register that's more medium, where you're not going too high or too low. Find a spot that will blend in with the rest of the band.
CMEA: How do you advise teachers to help their guitar players map out actual performance strategy? For instance, in a fairly complicated blues progression, the chart will have some altered chords and flat ninth chords. Then you look at the kid, and he's trying to do it all over the frets instead of using logical voice leading. Then when you watch a professional guitar player, it seems rather effortless, because the fingers tend to all be in this medium range you talked about. How do you help somebody figure that out?
JS: If you don't play guitar, then you go to the keyboard and you help them notice that the B flat in a C7 chord resolves nicely to the A in the F chord, and that the E of the C7 chord moves up to the F. Try to make them aware of how chords naturally want to resolve. On a guitar, you've got to do that too. That's why you can get away with just playing three-string chords. If you're playing the third and the seventh, and you're making it resolve to a chord that you're going to, a major chord or a minor chord, it sounds complete, because the bass player is catching the bass line.
So all you need to do is catch the main part of the chord which is the third and seventh. You can sound great. So, you go to the keyboard and show the kids the natural resolution of the chord; your ear can really follow, and that's what you try to do. You've got to get into some theory of how chords resolve, and then try to learn the voicings that allow you to do that. There are books out there that cover that.
CMEA: One of the things that's very important for any guitarist at any age, is to continually be listening to the repertoire, recordings, and to other people. Who were some of your main influences?
JS: As I grew up, I was listening to Johnny Smith and Tal Farlow. I was attracted to the guitar because I could hear it as a miniature orchestra. When I heard Joe Pass the first time, I thought here's this guy playing finger style electric guitar...that's what I want to do. I want to be able to play these chord solos. These early guys are important: Joe Pass could do it all. Wes Montgomery is another all time great. He could not only play the things that he became noted for -- playing those octaves -- but he was a great single line player and chord soloist. Wes Montgomery's album "Road Song" has a lot of great tunes.
Check out Django Reinhart; I wasn't that familiar with him as a kid growing up. I began to hear about Charlie Christiansen who was a guitarist with Benny Goodman, so I got into the history of the electric guitar, and how he had the first amplifier. Your sense of history helps to guide you through all of these people, then you come into what's going on now, and there's just so many great guitarists.
I like Elliot Fisk, a classical guitarist. His technique is just astounding. He plays a Paganini caprice, you can't believe is possible. It's a composition that's impossible to play by most violinists, and here he can play it on the guitar. There are people that are achieving things that nobody knew were even possible.
Locally, I studied with Tuck Andress (from Tuck and Patty). I was drawn to him because he makes a guitar - he plays these great bass lines while comping with the right hand -- sound like an entire orchestra. Then he comes back and hits the strings and gives you the back beat like the high-hat of a drum set. Michael Hedges does some interesting things on acoustic guitar; different tunings and so on ... there are just so many people out there. Al Dimeola.
Top ten recordings? I like a variety of styles. You have to check out the artists and see what's out there. Certainly, if you're going to go into classical guitar, then you're going to check out Segovia and right through Elliot Fisk who was respected so much by Segovia, that his former wife has him coming out to look at his estate, music. Christopher Parkening has wonderful recordings.
Then when you get into finger picking and country-style guitar, another guy I was really excited about, was Chet Atkins. There's a finger picking style that Merle Travis started called two-finger-picking, that leads to a solo guitar style that has this rag-time feel, with an on-going bass.
CMEA: Anything else you'd like to say?
JS: The guitar has a lot of possibilities. Guitar students are not different from anybody else. I hear some teachers say "Oh, those guitar kids are different." I found the difference is that maybe they're more individualistic about their music; it's more personal. They're not a member of a band; they don't want to march anywhere. And they don't necessarily want be in an ensemble. They want to do their own thing. A lot of them write music and are very creative.
My clarinet section in the school band aren't composing music like the number of kids in a guitar class. Because it's a chordal instrument, guitarists get into writing. Many times, when I am teaching all this theory to a guitar class, I'm thinking "How can I get my band and orchestra students to get into this? Why don't I have more kids in band composing and writing like all these kids in the guitar class?"
I think the guitar class in the school opens your eyes to the fact that we aren't reaching all the kids and we're not giving enough creative opportunities to our traditional classes: that is, the chance to compose, to write, and to individually express themselves. In a guitar class, everybody is learning notation, how chords work, and a right hand technique that's legitimate. They also listen to a variety of music. The goal is to inspire students to continue to grow and investigate music for the rest of their lives.
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