RE: The Holy Grail of Music Theory: The Circle of Fifths (FAST MUSIC THEORY)
I NEVER thought the C major scale was the easiest scale for any guitar student to learn- who thinks spontaneously CDEFGAB as a beginner as a logical series of note names? And what 4-year old can't say ABCDEFG? Starting there leads nearly immediately to the major scales, but trains the ear for other modalities from the outset, and minor modal thinking breaks some lazy thought patterns.
My early music education was oriented around the keyboard, a substantially illogical fixture of Western music that almost completely ignores the physics of sound (except for the repetitive character of the scale structure).
I try to eliminate every vestige of this conditioning when I teach, looking FIRST at vibrating strings (so theory must be first harmonicly grounded), then at a chromatic scale (whole-step half-step is just plain dumb everywhere else for everything other than keys and standard notation.)
Attentive string students whiz right through the stuff keyboard students frequently stumble over with great difficulty.
When you take a simplest-element approach to theory, you need to use the appropriate terminology for the student (I'm not going to say anything about theory of wave physics to an 8-year old, EVEN WHEN THEY ALREADY WORK WITH IT INTUITIVELY), but I have evidence it works better than simple rote or shoveling standard notation and the Circles on my guitar and mandolin students first thing. They ABSOLUTELY come in early, but not first thing.
HARMONY, HARMONY, HARMONY!
With me, guitar students always begin with the e minor pentatonic scale because it's easy. Children, especially, are more likely to benefit from scale knowledge once they are first presented with the fact that scales can be used for fun. Improvisation in my classroom happens as soon as it can.
Children piano students don't seem to have a hard time grasping CDEFGAB, especially when it's linked to something as simple as "just the white keys." Once someone grasps all of the major scales, I explain that they already know all of the minor scales also and we learn about relative minors. It takes less than 30 minutes for most kids to get this.
I agree with you that students should begin with interval based training. I always start people on note recognition, half steps and whole steps, and then intervals up to the Major 3rd (so they can learn chords easily). Scales and keys come after we've already learned a few songs in the key of C. Sound physics is fun, but doesn't ever make anybody play differently. It's an inspiring talk I give when a student's interest begins to slip, or they've played for enough years that they can think about it creatively.
Ultimately, this post is for anyone interested in understanding music. It's definitely not the first thing I'd start with, so absolute beginners would benefit from reading my theory posts from the beginning :)
I do private instruction, only- just last week, for the first time a local school music director and talked to me for an extended period of time, so that might change. The ratio of guitar to keyboard students is about 8:1, so there's no good reason to focus most students' attention on standard notation early (from which structure nearly all theory pedagogy derives, historically, let's face it).
Agreed. I don't make any beginners read music for many months--It increases my failure rate way too much because it's not initially fun.
I remember when I was 7 starting on piano- there wasn't the slightest hint of improvisation in what I was taught, it was all rote, and I can't think of an instance (admittedly, nearly 60 years later I won't remember much clearly) I EVER heard words like "mess around", "have some fun with it", "explore everything about the instrument"...I utterly refuse to avoid this with my students, so I'll challenge them to come up with any random melodic fragment, or a chord, or a rhythm, and spend at least a minute or two exploring it.
That is excellent!