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Le Ministre de l’au-delà, what kind of songs do you teach that don’t have chords? Just a simple melody of some sort? I’m not sure I understood the rest of your post re pivots and guides. I probably already do all that and don’t think about how it works, its been so long since I was a beginner, so I’m not sure how to break something down further than the level of chords.
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Squeegee: Okay, this is going to be too long, and I apologize in advance for anything I say that you already know.
First Steps is what I currently teach beginners from. Full disclosure - it is written by my current teacher. I used to teach from Frederick Noad , Julio Sagreras or Aaron Shearer, and still would if a student was already working through them. What I like about First Steps - it’s published in Tab and notation, so after the student knows all the pieces from learning them in tab, you can learn notation from something you already know how to play. The student starts off playing with all four standard fingers of the right hand in simple patterns that repeat throughout the piece. There’s a well written duet part for many of the pieces, and the student can play either first or second guitar fairly quickly. The noodly, new agey nature of the pieces makes it easy to encourage the students into improvisation and/or composition. And, all the pieces involve the use of guides, pivots and parallels right off the bat.
Now, I need to clarify two things - This would take about 10 minutes to explain in the studio with a guitar in each of our hands. Writing it down makes it harder to understand, in my opinion. Also, I don’t talk about guides, pivots and parallels to beginning students, I just talk about how ‘highly recommended’ the fingerings are. I try to allow them the discovery of how it all works. That being said, here’s a quick run-down.
A guide finger is any finger that stays on the same string but changes frets.
A parallel finger is any finger that changes strings but remains at the same fret.
A pivot finger is any finger that stays on the same string at the same fret.
So, consider the standard D chord and the standard E chord. If you’ve just learned them as two different grips, (or chord shapes, or chords, or whatever you want to call them.) you might succumb to the temptation to lift all three fingers and bring them down again in the next grip. However, if you slide your first finger from the second fret of the third string to the first fret of the third string and move your second finger from the second fret of the first string to the second fret of the fifth string, you have used a guide finger and a parallel, leaving only the third finger to have to lift off and sort itself from the third fret of the second string to the second fret of the fourth string.
I use a different fingering for the standard A Major grip: [First finger, second fret, third string], [second finger, second fret, fourth string], [third finger, second fret, second string]. This is easier for bunching up the three fingers at the second fret, and it means that when you change to D, you’ve got the first finger as a pivot, the second finger as a parallel and the third as a guide.
All this guide, pivot, parallel stuff is how you keep things smooth, efficient and ergonomic, and it’s common (despite different terminology for the same thing) to many different styles of guitar - classical, country, jazz, folk, rock. It’s one of the things I love about the instrument, that the same techniques apply across the board. Whether you call it a ligado descendente or a pull-off, it’s the same manoeuvre. Chet Atkins called pivots ‘anchors’, which is a pretty good word for them, too. I don’t care if you call them carrots, bedknobs and barfbags - they’re incredibly useful for learning how to navigate the complete fretboard easily.
Looking at the above, Lord, it’s a lot of electrons to explain something that’s pretty easy to just play.
