SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS
Hello All and welcome to another N10 Guitar Teacher blog post. This time it's about inspiring little minds and ears.
The Question
Young or old the one question I always ask my new students is "what music do you like?". This is one of my favourite questions to answer and has been the subject of many great discussions with friends over the years. However, for many of my younger students they will often answer this question with 'I don't know' or maybe I'll just get a shrug. If I ask them to think of music with guitar I normally get met with blank faces.
"Back in my day"...
When I was their age it was the 80's. We had Top of the Pops, Madonna was huge, Michael Jackson and Van Halen was a thing, we had Live Aid and Queen, MTV had arrived with videos like Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' and Dire Straits' 'Money For Nothing',...the list goes on. We had Marty McFly in Back to the Future - who I'm sure inspired many a child to strap on a guitar and blow up some speakers! I didn't have a particularly musical family myself but we had a vinyl player, and I spent many hours going through my parents' record collection, which was mainly made up of some funk records, some Leo Sayer and Fleetwood Mac, amongst others. My Dad also loved Dire Straits and hearing Mark Knopfler's country inspired guitar riffs as a young boy definitely caught my attention. We may not have had the best record collection of all time but as I remember it, music was everywhere and I knew at an early age how important it was.
Why?
So when I ask my young students what music they like, why do almost all almost all of them say 'I don't know'? Technology has moved on since the 80's and of course we have access to anything we want at the touch of a button. It seems to me that maybe smaller children are just not as exposed to as much music as previously. Parental restrictions on mobile devices, the requirement to have subscriptions to music services, the lack of music channels on TV and a lot less music in physical format may all be a contributing factors. Okay, nowadays children have YouTube, but being the gargantuan beast that it is, I wonder if it is a case of less is more in our day and more is less in theirs. One thing for sure, is that with the right parental guidance today's technology can provide our kids with instant access to unlimited amounts of inspirational music - far more than the kids of my generation could ever have imagined - and I hope you, the parents, will join me in trying to inspire these young minds with as much (age appropriate) music as possible.
How can I help?
So with all this in mind I have and will continue to create Spotify Playlists that I hope will inspire my young music students and budding guitarists. I'm sure most of you are familiar with Spotify, but for those who are not, its a paid music subscription service or free (with ads), you just need to create an account and log in. Once you do this you can listen to pretty much anything you want to and it would be amazing if you could go check out the N10GuitarTeacher profile and encourage your children to listen, listen and listen more.
I am a big believer in that everything they need to learn the guitar is already available in songs of the past and the present. The choices are endless but I've tried to put together a list of guitar based songs; new and old that will capture the attention of these wonderful young minds.
Thanks for reading,
Your new favourite guitar teacher, Dan.
N10 Muswell Hill, N10 Guitar Teacher, N10GuitarTeacher, North London Guitar Teacher.