We have a new official study program in our country that tells every school to teach guitar chords somewhere between 7th to 9th grade. Sounds great! But as there was no detailed plan how to make it happen, I put a project together and got some funds to educate music teachers for free. All in [...]
Read more →Once in a while I need a break from playing the guitar. This year I have discovered two possible things to do besides playing music. In July I got my first experiences as an alpinist. I spent a few weeks in altitudes higher than 3500 m and the peak was about 5000 m so I [...]
Read more →I was cleaning up my notes and stuff and found some 7-year old video recordings about me playing a couple of recitals:
Read more →I am developing a special course for children and will eventually publish a book. Before that I do a couple of live courses to adjust my material and ideas to the real life. Here is an example what we achieved in 8 lessons (June 2011). I started to record our work from the first gathering:
Read more →Kristo Käo and Viljar Kuusk in the workshop June 2011 Just came back from the academy and brought my brand new guitar. My luthier Viljar Kuusk completed it last week but still kept it for polishing. Now I said it’s enough because I have to play tomorrow and the day after. He can continue polishing [...]
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In the field of music or in other fields, a self-learner just getting started needs, in a sense, a completely different educational approach. The majority of textbooks have been written for this target group and many authors have realized that it is important to bring the first rung of the ladder as reachable as possible [...]
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Getting started is pretty easy – find the link “register” from the left corner of the Guitar School page and after logging in choose “My school” from the menu and you’re there! You will get more information during the first level. No tricks – you can learn for FREE and even send first exercises for [...]
Read more →Even to the greatest fan of acoustic music the situation may be familiar: you need to play with your precious instrument in front of a slightly bigger (or just noisy) audience. Often you depend on the local sound engineer who sticks an average condenser mic in front of you. Lucky you if you know something [...]
Read more →Unlike pianists, we, the guitarists have to carry our instrument from place to place every day. Some of us carry it to school, some to band gigs, some to recitals etc. We transport the guitars on our shoulders, in cars, on planes, trains and ships. Not to mention the bikes and bicycles. Who knows how [...]
Read more →The World is round and once in a while I find myself playing the guitar in places where this instrument is not as popular as we know it. Everyone who has read the Tony Palmer’s book about Julian Bream (A Life on the Road) knows what I am talking about So we were in India [...]
Read more →Every child knows that there are six strings on the guitar. But is it alwasy like this? In fact, there are numerous examples of guitars that have more or even less strings. Sometimes there is a clear reason for that but not always. Let’s clear it up a bit. When I talk about the history [...]
Read more →In many languages ‘left’ means something wrong, weak or bad. So in many cultures the left-handedness has regarded as ‘wrong’. Therefore it is difficult to say how many lefties do we really have. But using different tools that are designed for right-handed people may be tough for lefties. The same goes for musical instruments. Wikipedia [...]
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