About our Program Design

Our target market

We are not trying to be all things to all people. Our program design reflects a number of decisions we have made about the market we wish to serve. We are clearly oriented toward:

Adults...not kids.
Recreational players...not aspiring pros.
Acoustic guitarists...not electric.
People who want to play with others...not solo.
People with eclectic tastes...not fixed on one artist or genre.
People who want to work on both rhythm and lead guitar...not just one or the other.

This simple outline of our target market goes a long way toward making clear what sets our approach apart from the predominant models for group guitar instruction programs that are currently available. Broadly speaking, these fall into two groups:

The academic model. This would be the kind of program you would typically find at a college offering a music major.
The grab-bag model. In this approach, a music store or community music center gathers together whatever teachers are available and invites them to offer classes in their areas of interest or expertise.

While either of these approaches can work well under the right circumstances, there are reasons why we have decided to take a different tack.

The CGP versus the academic model.

There is a lot of instructional material on the market designed for college level guitar study but none that has been organized into a coherent program for recreational players. Even if you were to try to cobble together such a program from the available material, our experience suggests that you'd be fighting an uphill battle. Here are some of the reasons why.

These programs tend to be oriented towards jazz and classical guitar, both of which are extremely demanding and of interest to a rather small slice of the recreational guitar market.

The Community Guitar Program, by contrast, is built around songs and styles that allow for easy access on the ground floor but offer lots of headroom for the advancing guitarist. This material is generally ignored in academic music programs.

These programs are oriented toward people who intend to make a full-time commitment to the learning process for a number of years, i.e. music students.
The players who make up our target market have lives that include jobs, kids, and other interests. We try to offer them the opportunity to move forward as players while making a realistic demand on their time.

In an academic setting, the program design follows from the assumption that a student is starting at the beginning, successfully completing each successive class, and moving towards a goal of graduation.

Well, that would be nice. In the real world, in our world, anyway, folks don't necessarily want to start at the beginning, follow every step, or finish every project. They come and go; they master some things and let others slide. Within reasonable limits, our program is designed to accommodate this kind of participation.

With the exception of formal guitar ensemble arrangements, very little of the instructional material prepared for the academic setting actually constitutes music that a group of guitarists can play together.

By contrast, the bulk of our instructional material is built around rhythm and lead guitar parts that are meant to be played together. While these may resemble guitar ensemble arrangements, and we may initially approach them as such, the intention is very different. Our arrangements are meant to approximate what a group of guitarists at a given level of competency might come up with on their own with a modest effort, if not completely spontaneously. Once the songs and skills have been integrated, straying from the arrangement is not only tolerated but encouraged. In fact, this is the primary focus of work at Level 3.

Academic instructional material almost always assumes (or is oriented towards developing) comfort with standard music notation.
While we encourage students to acquire at least a basic familiarity with standard notation, our instructional material is presented in both standard notation and TAB, both backed up by audio.

The CGP versus the grab-bag model.

Given the limitations of the academic model and the difficulty of building a coherent alternative from scratch, many stores and music centers with a group instruction program of any size have opted for what we'll refer to (with no disparagement intended) as the grab-bag model. One way to characterize this approach is to say that it is instructor-driven rather than curriculum-driven. The host institution seeks out talented players and/or well-regarded instructors, asks them what they would like to do by way of a class, and combines these into a series of offerings. Voila...instant program!

This approach clearly has its strengths. To name a few:

The host institution can end up with a very diverse program.
It is built around the strengths and passions of the instructors involved.
It allows for a great deal of variety from season to season and year to year.

The grab-bag model is not without its downsides, however, and we think our Community Guitar Program offers an attractive alternative that addresses some of the problems inherent in this approach. For example...

For an independent guitar teacher, the grab-bag model is simply not an option.

By contrast, the Community Guitar Program makes it practical for such teachers to set up a strong group lesson program on their own without having to start from scratch.

What the grab-bag approach gains in variety, it tends to lack in coherence. Classes tend to be unrelated and the program overall somewhat disjointed.

A Community Guitar Program, on the other hand, offers an integrated approach to helping students move from the most basic skills to playing at a high level of technical ability and creativity. For those who are motivated to do so, it is obvious how one might progress through the various levels of the program.

The host institution that takes the grab-bag approach is entirely dependent on the availability of its instructors and the quality of the course material they create. Maybe recruitment of top-quality teachers is a challenge in your area. Maybe you've come to depend on one gifted instructor...and he's moving or going on tour. Maybe (and this is almost a certainty) the best-known, best-loved players in your area are too busy to write and record high quality instructional materials for the occasional class they do for you. Exactly how this problem manifests will vary, but at the heart of it all is the same problem: the grab-bag approach is not really a program with an independent existence at all. It's just a particular collection of teachers that may or may not come together in a way that works over time for the students and for the host institution.

Any educational program depends on skilled, committed teachers, and ours is no different. But the Community Guitar Program provides those teachers with the structure and the instructional materials they need to ply their craft. This, in turn, provides the host institution with a certain guaranteed standard of quality and with the assurance that, should a given teacher move on for whatever reason, the continuity of the program need not be severely disrupted.

The players who are available to teach in a grab-bag program may gravitate towards styles that do not lend themselves particularly well to group instruction. While it is tempting to offer such classes, because people will indeed sign up for them, at least once, over the long haul any unsatisfying learning experience on the part of your students will undermine your program.
If there is one principal that guides our entire approach it is this: group instruction works best when the existence of the group itself is an asset. Since our focus is on the skills and styles of music that lend themselves well to playing with others, the group format is not only appropriate, it is the natural setting for such work.

A grab-bag program needs to be continually reinvented. What is being offered and who is doing the offering is constantly in flux. That means real work for someone, work that may entail real headaches.
While we anticipate that the Community Guitar Program will change over time, especially in response to the feedback we get from participating teachers, the program should not require anything like this level of ongoing maintenance. This is very good news for busy music store owners and music center directors.

Finally, it is worth noting that for institutions that are drawing on a large enough population base, a series of Community Guitar classes could be among the offerings of a larger grab-bag program. There's no inherent conflict between the two, and once students have a taste of what we're offering, we think a significant percentage of them will grab our classes from the bag!

One of the elements that will most clearly set our classes apart is the quality of the learning materials we have prepared for you or your staff of instructors. So if you have not yet looked at the pages devoted to a closer look at our instructional materials, we suggest that as your next stop on the tour...

About our instructional materials.