An intermediate level guitarist will have strengths and weaknesses Our job as a guitar teacher is to work out what those strengths and weaknesses are and to bring the the weaker parts of their playing up to the level of the things that they do best

An intermediate guitar student is someone who can play the guitar but not as well as they wish to in the future

If they were just a guitar player with no particular desire or drive to get better then they would just be an ordinary or average guitar player What sets them apart is the word “student” They come to us because they have a desire to get better and if we help them to fulfil that desire they will continue to attend our lessons and give us the money that we need to ward off a day job

The dilemma of the intermediate guitarist

One of the most common situations I found myself in as a guitar teacher over the years (and decades!) is the one where someone would pitch up for a first lesson and say something along the lines of “I can play but I keep going around in circles and I don't seem to be getting any better”

They are likely to have been chasing a style of guitar playing and exposing themselves to YouTube videos etc and learning to put their fingers where someone they admire once did in a recording studio but even though they can sound convincing they don't really understand what it is they are doing

There are a range of commonly encountered technical issues that often go along with being an intermediate level guitar player and these should be confronted and dealt with gradually because your student can already play

I regularly see players who have learned to function perfectly well as in they sound fine but they are making things much more difficult for themselves because they do not use all of the fingers on their fretting hand and one of them (normally the pinkie) gets a free ride

Another very common technical issue is that they do not have natural strumming styles and/or their picking technique is one that they have just developed accidentally and even though they might be making the right noises at the right times they are making it way harder than it needs to be

Good technique on a guitar is not an end in itself but a good technique will make playing easier and music sound better

Replacing a guitar player's "subconcious technique"

A subconcious technique is "the way that you play when you're not thinking about how you play"

I have a bunch of guitar technique exercises that I regularly use in order to help a student to develop a technique that will allow them to go further faster

I only use a few exercises to do this as the objective is to change the way that a player operates automatically on the guitar when he or she is playing the music that they want to play and there is little point in just adding more and more just for the sake of it

Teaching intermediate players is not just about guitar technique

They can do things but they don’t know what they are doing and why they are doing it Lots of guitar players can play the riff for “Sweet Child Of Mine” but not so many will be able to tell you that its really just based around a common D chord shape moved up twelve frets with the first finger of the fretting hand taking the place of the nut They probably don’t realise that the note of D is common to all three of the basic chords in the progression (C Cadd9 and G) for the verse of the song They don’t know how to progress from where they are and when they put their guitar down they don’t feel that they are any better than when they picked it up

The majority of intermediate players have been self (or poorly) taught and during the early stages of learning to play they have quite correctly concentrated on becoming physically capable of making convincing sounding noises fall out of the guitar or amplifier but now in order to make rapid and significant progress our job as a teacher is to have them concentrate on the aspects of musicianship that are not their strong points For most of the players that we will encounter as teachers that means the thorny subject of music theory rears it's ugly head

Guitar teachers must make music theory relevant to their students

If music theory ever looks to your student like a bunch of pointless hoops to jump through then they will be reluctant to apply themselves to the study of it and as their teacher that will be 100% your fault

A guitar teacher needs to have their students come to regard music theory as a tool that they can use rather than a mountain that they need to (ointlessly?) climb

Music theory is not "the rules" of music

Music existed before anybody came up with the theory behind it and music theory does not give us the rules of music which may never be disobeyed but it does give us "options" which we may or may not apply It is better to know which rules you are breaking and how you are choosing to break them than to stumble about the same twelve notes that everyone else has had for centuries hoping to come up with something completely and totally unique (spoiler alert-you won't)

Teaching intermediate guitar players is about filling in the gaps When setting out to teach an intermediate level guitarist a teacher needs to know what an intermediate level guitarist is

It is easier in a way to look at the problem from a different perspective and to identify what an intermediate player is not

They are not a beginner

They are not an advanced player

In terms of technical ability they can probably get around basic open and bar chords and it is likely that they will be able to play a few scales or single note passages derived from scales (although they might not know it yet)

With relation to music theory and its application to guitar the typical intermediate level player tends to have very little understanding of a “joined up” knowledge of music theory

What the intermediate player needs is often not a whole set of new things to play but rather they need a framework for understanding what they can already play and a plan for taking this new found understanding forward

The three pillars of guitar teaching wisdom (theory, technique and repertoire) are really just a construct that I came up with to help guitar teachers and their students come up with an understanding of where they are currently and how they might originate and enact a plan to get them to where they want to be