Music Lessons for My Kid

- honest answer based on my experience with an 8 year old starting to play guitar 4 years ago:....It is all about engaging them, about sparking an interest and I am not convinced that books and DVD's will do that ( I hope I am wrong for your sake).

We paid for 1:1 lessons from the start and then got him playing with others once a week in a group lessons, - and it was that playing with others in a group lesson that lead to a live performance that sparked more interest than anything else. The fact that his group teachers were teaching between 10 and 20 kids in one go to play songs that they knew was great. His 1:1 teacher would then refine the playing technique as this was not possible with so many kids in a lesson.

I cannot stress this enough it is the songs that engage and drive him to practise, - he will run through the scales etc and does improvisation with his 1:1 teacher but the real effort comes from practising over and over again a song that he wants to play because he likes it.Recently he seems to stick at Red Hot Chili Pepper songs more than anything else so we leave him to work at those. - Ask him to play something like Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen/Jeff Buckley which he was taught and because he hates it as a song it is like pushing an elephant up the stairs.

I have been given music software and DVD's by a friend who owns a company writing this stuff and selling it to the Education sector and to be honest he has looked at them once and not gone back to them. He will however look up YouTube guitar lesson on a song that he likes and play and pause it over and over again until he gets it, the key again is the fact that it is a song that he wants to play.

Good luck Bill - there is nothing better than watching your child learn something.