This evening/morning I’m working on adding guitar tabs to my lesson book. For years I’ve had my own personal curriculum that draws on several different styles of music. I encourage my students to bring in songs they want to learn (I’m good at figuring them out and writing them down), but my book serves as a graded progression of songs that I know well and that teach certain principles.
Lately I’m seeing the need for more beginner type songs – many of my curriculum’s songs are harder and some students just don’t get that far but want to learn songs they know when they start out. “Home on the Range” is great for learning chords, but kids can only get so excited about that. It’s tough to pick songs that I know, they know, and that teach something. Fortunately I have lots of experience doing this through Young Life clubs where we actually have high school kids singing! We do songs they like. A lot of the time these are oldies – timeless classics that almost everyone knows, like “Brown-Eyed Girl”, “Free Falling”, Build Me Up Buttercup, etc. Even today’s kids love singing these songs in a group.
So tonight I tabbed out “Yellow Submarine”, “Over my Head”, and “Comfortably Numb”. Not *everyone* knows these songs, but one benefit of the digital age of music is that I can tell any of my students to just go buy it on iTunes for $1. Or they can listen for free on any number of websites springing up like YouTube.
Eventually if I keep adding to my curriculum, I’ll have so many songs that students can pick and choose which ones they want to learn at any given skill level.
On a different note, our little band’s name is now “Sugar Road”. We ditched the “Off” and this is the last time I’m changing the name 🙂 The website is theholtsite.com/sr. We just ordered a $200 PA system so we can start playing out more! In the months to come we’ll be practicing and recording more songs to put up on the site. Check out the two we already have recorded and leave us a comment!
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