Guitar Lessons

Yesterday I learned the pentatonic scale on the guitar. (did I tell you that I was taking guitar lessons? It's pretty cool to learn the scale on the guitar...strange, because I've known the pentatonic scale for a long time (from piano lessons) but just haven't done it for the guitar...

To be honest, I was thinking about quitting the guitar lessons. The primary motivation for taking the guitar lessons was so that I would be worthy of the Kevin Ryan guitar that I will be getting in a month or two. (Over a 2 1/2 year wait!) But I was travis picking for a while, which really wasn't all that exciting to me. The teacher I have is new (I'm a new student) so there was some 'feeling out' of where I was skillwise. But I feel that we have now gotten some traction, and he's starting to give me stuff that I would enjoy playing, as well as learning...

The Teacher-Student relationship is an interesting one. I'm used to my teachers writing their lessons in a separate notebook that I need to provide, detailing the songs, exercises that I need to play, etc, etc... Some of my teachers just wrote in the front cover of the book, but they would write down things like "Hanon Exercise #5" and on that page would write down '152' or '176' for the beat...then I would know what was expected of me. But with Bill (teacher), he just underlines the songs in the TOC that he wants me to play. Unfortunately, he doesn't write what I should do with it (pick the melody, work on travis picking, etc, etc...) which contributes to me not practicing. I can't remember what songs are ones I "finished" and which songs I still need to work on, so most of the time I putz around for a couple of minutes, and then go bike riding. I'm thinking about asking him to write it all down in a notebook, and tell me when I'm "finished" with a song, but I don't want to force him into something that's not his teaching style, and worse offend him...*shrug* Knowing me, I'll just bring it up anyway and botch the whole job, and I'll have to get another teacher.
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