Deep Thoughts On Teaching and Learning To Play Guitar

Guitar teacher is the wrong term. No one can inject the ability to play guitar into your brain. I like tour guide better. No, tour guide doesn’t exactly roll off the brain. How about these…

Cicerone, a guide who gives information about antiquities and places of interest to sightseers, applies quite well, with the caveat that sightseers do a lot of seeing and not a lot of doing. Learning guitar is, of course, very much about doing.

I also like Sherpa, a member of a Himalayan people living on the borders of Nepal and Tibet, renowned for their skill in mountaineering. Sherpa automatically includes the mountain climbing metaphor. Learning to play the guitar can feel an awful lot like climbing Mount Everest.

So let’s go with Sherparone. That word sounds like a cheese. I love cheese, and so does my cat Ferguson. I digress…

In a world where all the information