COVID-19 Crisis: Open Letter To Face-to-Face Students

Dear guitar students and parents

What a time the world is facing – it’s quite unreal as to how quickly this crisis emerged, and how things have literally been turned upside down. It is times like these that music, art and creativity show true meaning and how as humans we thrive on these things that make us who we are, and what we find identity in.

As students of music, we are lucky to have music in our lives, and in particular the classical guitar is well suited to these close-living, isolated situations we find ourselves in. The sound is beautiful, but not too loud; expressive in an almost vocal way; the guitar is compact enough to only require a small space; but above all it is a challenging instrument that requires patience and dedication but has a massively rewarding payoff in the end.

Musicians face a difficult time as music has always been created with one goal in mind – to share with others. Gigging musicians, concert performers, and all the behind the scenes people are facing a really tough time as there is effectively zero work. Music teachers are also taking strain, but luckily for us we have the chance, with a little uptake in new skills, to deliver lessons and work with students remotely.

I am sorry to have taken this last week off from private teaching. I have been contemplating how to move forward and to try and formulate a structure that will be of most value to the students.

While live sessions are definitely part of this structure, music teachers must not think that a live online session can replace a face to face lesson. It simply can’t. The technology used for conferencing, such as zoom, microsoft teams, FaceTime etc is incredible but it has been designed for “meetings” where the sound quality needs to be no better than a standard mobile telephone call. As you can well imagine for music teachers, sound is everything and therefore the subtleties of playing an instrument across these platforms is somewhat lost.

My thinking is that a session (lesson) will now be structured into two or three parts.

Part 1 would be myself creating a lesson/practice plan for the week ahead which would include clear goals for which piece/song to practice, which technical exercises to master, which theoretical concepts to understand, and which general knowledge (contextual) points about the piece the student must research. Then an assignment and due date is given.

Part 2 is the work undertaken by the student. Here I suggest the student practices and works on the assignment over a few days and when feels ready, makes a video recording of their performance of their piece/song (or section of) and of any technical exercises (each recorded separately). The student must also fill out any worksheets that have been assigned. These recordings and documents are then placed in a shared folder (dropbox, google drive etc) for me to review. I will watch the videos and read the assignments and spend some time writing out notes and feedback. One reason for doing a recording is that you will notice that sound of a video recording is far far superior to the sound of a live conference call and therefore I can judge the musical intention much more clearly.

Part 3 would be to have a live session where we discuss my feedback and for the student to ask any questions. A bit like a Q&A. Of course there will be playing by both the student and the myself, relating to the questions and feedback i.e. more demonstrations than performances.

After Part 3, the student can then work on all the topics/suggestions raised before attempting to record a new (and hopefully improved!) version. And so the student can develop musically, with the aim of building up a repertoire that can be performed for immediate family members in close quarters or for friends and family around the neighbourhood, suburb, city, country or around the world.

I will be setting up teaching space using a good quality condenser microphone. Over the next few months I will invest in some good webcams or GoPro like devices to get clearer visuals. I’ll be experimenting with lighting, angles and delivery of content. We’re in this journey together and my sincere hope is that whatever you choose to do that you continue playing guitar.

I’ll contact each of you individually to discuss this notice and your individual plan for continuation of guitar instruction over the next few months before things return to (a new) normal. I’m looking forward to seeing each of you online very soon!

Kind regards,
Darryl