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Thoughts on taking sporadic lessons from different teachers


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Just curious if others have tried this and what their experiences have been.  After spending the last 1-2 years doing self-study (lots of great clips on youtube from which to pick up ideas, but there is no feedback mechanism), I thought it would be great to take a lesson or two from various teachers, to see different perspectives and focus on different elements, and get some general objective coaching.  In the Boston area, there is no shortage of Berklee professors and alumni who are happy to give some sporadic private lessons.  I have done two very different ones so far and plotting with the 3rd guy now.  The only problem is that I end up designing a whole practice routine around each approach, and having these different programs of study and working on them simultaneously pretty much sucks up all of my music time, leaving no time for just fun jamming, writing, recording, etc.

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29 minutes ago, Steve Haynie said:

If you have a band or friends to jam with, pull back from some of the lessons and use what you have been learning.

I do have a bi-weekly jazz group I meet with so I do get to try the stuff out once every two weeks.  not enough though...

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I have no experience in this particular arena, so I'm happy to chime in with my $0.02. :D

  • I think it's totally fine to audition a bunch of teachers.  You click with some, not with others.  
  • The teachers that push you to be your best may not be the ones you "click with", so be open to the fact that the perfect relationship might not be the one you're expecting.

For my $0.02, I'd audition a bunch and then stick with your favorite.

Edit:  I think that if you've got a particular skill or block you're having problems with (e.g. fingerstyle acoustic, sweeping arpeggios, hybrid picking) I think sporadic lessons to get you past that hump and back "on track" are totally fine.  But my uneducated gut feel is that having a consistent teacher-and-coach-type relationship will get you farther faster.  Any teacher I ever had could see through my bullshit and really pinpoint my weaknesses.  Uncomfortably so.  But it that takes for them to get to know me well enough to give that feedback.

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43 minutes ago, Studio Custom said:

Find someone who matches where you wish to go stylistically and stick with them for six months to a year. 

You can also take Berklee classes online if what you seek is more conceptual than physical.

Well, I wanted very specific things from these guys.  For example, one guy is a monster at outside playing, and I watched his youtube clips but I really wanted to talk to him and figure out how he actually composes the lines, how he "hears" the tensions and how he thinks about them.  He answered all those questions and he showed me some very cool exercises for incorporating it into my playing.  Very different from anything I got from his youtube clips.  I probably only need one more lesson from him in a few weeks, but it's only one element to my playing that I wanted to improve.  I don't think there is a need for me to meet with him every week or every other week.  There is another guy who I think I will start meeting with pretty regularly.  I had one great lesson with him, he has quite a lot to teach me in my weakest area and one where I really want to make huge progress over the next couple of years.  So I guess I am kind of converging to the advice you guys gave me above.  But I still think it's fun to take a lesson with someone very unique every once in a while.  I love seeing unique perspectives and approaches.

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I've done that twice and it has proven very useful to me. I guess the key to success is having clear goals and narrowing down the content of the lessons to what you really want.

First time I did, it was with a lady who is a local guitar ace specialized in Gipsy jazz. She can shred. She wanted me to learn to improvise in Gipsy jazz by building upon my metal/rock lead chops. However, I just wanted to learn "the pump" (the way rhythm guitar is played in Gipsy jazz), as well as the typical progressions, rhythmic adorns and chords substitutions used in the genre. Back then I was playing in a trio, my role was being the rhythm guitarist and I wanted to improve my stylistic vocabulary to better do what I was supposed to do, so no way I would let my teacher to steer me away from my goal. I had to struggle a bit to keep her focused on what I wanted to learn from her. I succeeded.

The second time it was similar. Went to see a local teacher who knows how to groove. I told him my goal was improving my funk and reggae rhythmic chops. The guy at first did an assessment, we jammed like ten minutes using a I-IV-V progression, a bit like a reggae-ish shuffle, taking turns to solo, and he said I could keep rhythm and improvise very well, so he saw no problem with me in the rhythmic department. I replied I never said I couldn't keep the beat; I just said that I wanted to learn funk and reggae rhythmic idioms. We began working on some basic patterns thereafter. After few weeks he wanted me to learn a percussive technique he does, which is a sort of multi-tapping that sounds absolutely awesome. That's extremely cool, but it deviated from my goal. I did try his stuff just to please him, but politely asked him to go back to my goal for the next lesson.

So, that's my own experience with the approach and how I handled these teachers who wanted me to solo or to do wild stuff that was certainly fantastic, but which wasn't what I wanted to learn from them. Hope this info is useful to you. Good luck!

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Taking every opportunity to jam with players better than me has always been the best teacher.  

There are also some very good players who will do Skype lessons if you're just out to pick their brains about a particular song or technique of theirs.   I took 4 lessons from Dave Weiner (the other guitarist in Vai's band) and he showed me some very cool stuff but the best things I learned were what I didn't know - the holes in my knowledge base.  It really opened my eyes and has made me a better player over time.  

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