The Blog

My former student Mark alerted me to the Chameleon Guitar, a new acoustic-electric hybrid that uses computer processing to make realistic acoustic tone. I was impressed with their audio files, and then astounded to watch a video and realize that they have the body size of a typical Strat.

Yesterday I launched Rob’s Totally Awesome Guitar Teaching Handbook, my guide for running a successful guitar teaching business. It’s been two years in the making. I summed up my feelings in the Conclusion, written during yesterday’s marathon of last-minute writing, editing, and battling Microsoft Word:

“If teaching guitar is about spreading joy, writing this book has been like collecting joy in a giant container. Today I finally get to tip it over.”

Writing this book taught me several things:

1) I love writing every day. I love how it wakes up my creative mind. It’s like having X-ray vision, except it’s Creative Vision: I’m more playful with language in conversation, a humminbird glistening in my backyard inspires a line of poetry–I even pay closer attention to music.

2) I love self-publishing. I probably would not have written this book had I been born 20 years earlier. Even if I could have found a publisher, royalties would not have paid for all the tea I drank as I wrote. But by self-publishing, I keep over 95% of sales (the rest goes to PayPal), which means I don’t need to sell nearly as many books to make it profitable. Plus, the popularity of my website may help me sell more books than a big publisher every could have.

3) I love teaching guitar. Putting my ideas about and enthusiasm for this job into words has driven the feeling home.

Learn more about the Handbook here.

I’m spending the morning revising Rob’s Totally Awesome Guitar Teaching Handbook, still on track for an October 3 release. Writing a first draft can be a slog, but I love revising. I just turned a terrible paragraph in the book—my introduction to my Teaching 101 chapter—into one of favorites:

Old:
Teaching is a complex art, and it takes a lot of practice to be really good at it, but you’ll be off to a great start if you use the roadmap that I’m about to lay out for you.

New:
Aristotle calls teaching “the highest form of understanding.” What does that make the act of teaching about teaching? I don’t know, but it sounds like it could create a black hole.

To avoid obliterating the universe, I won’t try to teach you everything…

Much better.

Update: The Handbook is now available for purchase here.

I hope you find the new site easier to navigate and easier on the eyes. Let me know what you think, especially if you find any bugs. Thanks!

After a few readers said they didn’t like the white-text-on-brown-background in the last design proposal, I did some research about text readability. I was surprised to discover that there isn’t consensus, except that high contrast is good. I did find one almost decade-old study claiming that green-on-pale-yellow was most readable, but I’ll save that color scheme for my next gardening blog, thank you very much.

Here’s a more conservative design. In addition to changing font and background color, I’ve increased the body text size and navigation a bit–two changes I think I’ll keep no matter what I do.

I like the look of the original design more, but I do think this is more readable.

What do you think?

I’m redesigning my site in preparation for launching my eBook next month. What do you think so far?

Click for larger image

Up early this morning working on my almost-finished book for guitar teachers, which I’m tentatively calling Rob’s Totally Awesome Guitar Teaching Handbook.

Yesterday I came up with this introduction to a section on teaching your students to play safely (I mean avoiding tendinitis, not avoiding spearing their bass player with a Flying V) by taking frequent breaks:

Was the summer I bought my first six-string
Bought it at the five and dime
Played it ‘til my fingers bled
Was the summer of ’69
Bryan Adams, “Summer of ‘69”

Three years later I got my first flare-up
Got it rocking all night through
Now I’m stuck singing backup vocals
Was the bummer of ‘72
The Missing Verse

Update: The Handbook is now available for purchase here.

Brett and I discussed the popularity of Wesley’s “Folsom Prison Blues” video, some of the tricks I use for teaching guitar to young kids, and I got in a little rant about the bankruptcy of American culture.

Here’s an .mp3 of the 40-minute interview.

Brett Singer of Babble Radio (an online talk radio program associated with the parenting magazine Babble) will be interviewing me this Friday about the popularity of what has come to be known as the “Folsom Pwison Blues” video. I hope I get a chance to talk about some of the interesting issues this video brings up:

• How should music be taught to kids?
• What is inappropriate material for young musicians?
• How does fame affect kids?
• How do the Seymour Duncan Antiquity pickups stand up against real ’50’s Tele pickups? (OK, so we may not get to that one….)

Visit Here on Friday at 9am for the live broadcast. Just have that page open in your browser and the show will start streaming at 9am. Log in if you’d like to type comments or questions in the chatroom.

A recording of the show will be available.

Yesterday, my student Wesley’s little “Folsom Prison Blues” video got almost 100,000 views on YouTube, and his parents and I were flooded with attention from the media. It’s been exciting, disorienting, and a little worrisome.

The internet, especially, is such a brutal force—and by the internet, I mean the way people act on the internet. The general public, from the anonymity of their offices and bedrooms, would just as soon rip someone to shreds as shower them with affection.

Getting all this press is like cuddling with a tiger. It’s licking my face! It loves me!

Or is it just tasting me?