Modern Band Rockfest 2016

Who doesn't want to impress their friends with their knowledge of a ton of cool popular songs on guitar? This workshop takes the concept of learning the most famous riffs and uses them to build a sequential curriculum for skill building, using one a day for the entirety of a semester. We will start from the most basic memorable riffs and build on them to look at concepts of style, phrasing, and articulation. We will work on progressive real world examples of how bends, slurs, palm-muting, and scales all intersect to create the most recognizable songs of the popular music canon! By the end, session participants will not only have a fun way of building guitar skills, but an impressive collection of riffs to play! While this workshop will begin with easy guitar riffs, it will progress through intermediate level skills.

Who can fix your Little Kids Rock guitars when they need a little “tender loving care”? You can!
This session is a “hands-on” workshop which will give you the basic skills to maintain and repair your guitars. The session starts with how to clean and restring guitars (nylon acoustic, steel-string acoustic, and electric), and progresses into neck adjustment, repairing separated acoustic tops and neck joints, changing tuning heads, troubleshooting electronics, and basic soldering techniques. We want a broken instrument fixed and in a student’s hands as quickly as possible, and you can fix it!

No More “Drill and Kill” chord changing exercises. Bring the excitement to your classroom with chord changing and composition games such as the train, four chord tap, Speed Racer, Simon Says Chords, Tic Tac Chords, Mega Tic Tac, and Mad Lib Blues. These games are perfect for the beginning guitarists of any age. At the completion of the workshop, participants will be armed with a whole new repertoire of guitar games to play to encourage even the most hesitant and stubborn of rockers to succeed.

Have you always wanted to take a guitar solo but not sure where to start? Wondering what comes after the two/four note solos taught in our Modern Band 101 workshop? This session willl review the basic pentatonic scale that’s hanging in your classrooms and also discover some easy additional shapes to build upon (hey, because we all want options!) Join us in this safe environment to practice basic rockstar techniques such as bending, slides, vibrato...and how to hold your own in any jam session!

A strong foundation in guitar playing is a combination of simple technical basics, finding the joy of playing, committing songs to muscle memory, and practicing with or without the instrument, all leading to learning songs that you want to play and having fun doing so!  This workshop will focus on many of those skills as well as applying them to songwriting, improvisation, and accompaniment.  We will use simple songwriting tools to create interesting ways of making music, building up courage to solo through having clearly outlined tools in your musical shed, and how to make others sound good through great accompaniment skills, one of the more overlooked parts of being a popular musician.  Remember,  ‘a good musician can make any instrument sound good' so lets work on the best skills for having an enjoyable time playing.

In this workshop, you will learn an innovative way of teaching guitar to beginner students. A big focus of this method is a form of guitar pedagogy developed by John Henry Sheridan, called Single String Tablature. This is what I use for my first unit of starting students on guitar. Any teacher that has taught chords to students is familiar with some of the common struggles like fret buzz, difficulty identifying strings and frets, confusing string numbers for fret numbers, lack of developed rhythm, and many more hardships for the beginner guitarist. An approach that teaches single string tablature at first can drastically improve the aforementioned struggles, making sure that by the time students start chords, they have a great understanding of the mechanics of the instrument. This workshop is a series of warm-ups, drills, vocabulary, and most importantly, a vast repertoire of single string melodies, represented on a one-line tab staff. Most of the repertoire consists of original compositions by John Henry Sheridan, containing lyrics and embedded guitar concepts. In the workshop, I will share much of this repertoire, and some of the formulaic methods for teaching these pieces. This includes teaching by rote by having students learn to chant the lyrics, slowly replacing the lyrics with fret numbers, and finally applying the fret chant to any string of the guitar. This creates great concert repertoire, while preparing students to awesomely learn chords!

Using approximation to learn how to improvise is a great tool for creativity, but enhancing it by looking at the most memorable solos is a great way to take your playing to the next level. This workshop will look at some of the most famous guitar solos and examine their content to learn the style, scales, and riffs that stood the test of time. Participants will work on the basics of guitar skills such as bends, slurs, slides, as well as see how scales are actually used in solos. Repertoire selections will utilize the solos of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, and Santana, to name a few. This workshop is geared towards intermediate and advanced players.