I had a student today ask me about how to properly produce vibrato. I was momentarily stumped. I really never thought about it before, and I had to pause for a bit to think about it. In the past I have had this problem with questions about left-hand muting, and a good 95% of right hand technique. I don’t think about much as far as technique goes, I just do it.
It took becoming a teacher to realize the answers to some of these expression-based questions, that to me were just natural answers to reproducing the tones I heard on records. No one taught me how how to mute a string. I heard a James Brown record and I liked how short the notes were and discovered that by resting my fingers across the strings, the notes became shorter– and at the time I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it!!
So what am I getting at? Well, on one hand I feel like my lessons shouldn’t just be about theory and ear training, but about the bits and pieces that make music so amazing. Expression. That is the thing, that I’d imagine in any subject, is the most difficult to teach, but I think it’s really what separates a good teacher from the rest, and I am not sure I am equipped to teach a 16 year old kid how to express himself.
My lessons, thus far, have been about enabling a beginning student with the tools he or she needs to teach themselves. Some teachers really lay it on with “proper technique.” The only rules I am stickler about are usually related the to left hand and even then only for the sake of efficiency. My lesson goals consist mostly of learning songs from records, reading notation and chord symbols, knowing the chords & arpeggios in any given scale and, most importantly, knowing how to apply all of these skills to a band situation. I think, for the most part, that’s a solid working philosophy for any music teacher. I just don’t know if all of those things are really what music is all about.
