Courses

Have you always wanted to play the guitar, but you were afraid it would be too hard to learn? This course will help make guitar playing easy and fun. At a comfortable pace, students will learn basic chords and right-hand accompaniment patterns and apply these techniques to easy folk and popular songs—including songs written by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and more. The course will also lead students through a study of elementary music reading on the instrument, which will allow them to acquire basic musicianship skills with the goal of playing simple melodies on the guitar from standard musical notation. Additionally, this study will enable students to pick up a piece of sheet music and accurately follow the directions found there in terms of form, chord symbols, and meter. We will also cover how to tune with and without a guitar tuner, how to change a string, how to use a pick, and how and when to use a capo. At the end of the course, students will have the opportunity to play all of the songs they learned together during the quarter, and they can choose to perform for each other at a virtual open mic night.