As my first blog post, I think it would be good to explore why I created this site in the first place. I also want to explore why I think it's best to be careful about how I integrate it with my in person teaching.
I started work on this site about a year ago. At the time, I was receiving new students at Hip Cat often. I wanted a way to easily share lesson policies with students and parents. I also wanted a site where people could find and read about my teaching philosophy to see if I would be a good fit. To me, teaching is about having a genuine connection with the student and I did not want a website between that connection.
I was working with a student who I asked to memorize all of the Perfect 5ths. He mentioned that he couldn't find any tool to help him with that task online. I figured that would be easy to program so I wrote the Interval Memorization exercise in about an hour. I'm sure someone else had done the same thing somewhere else but I had fun making it.
I created Find the Note when I noticed my older students weren't interested in sight reading. I require all my students to know the notes on their fretboard. I believe the best way to do this is to sight read sheet music in different positions on the fretboard. I make sight reading optional for adults so I created Find the Note to help them learn the fretboard. Of the exercises I've written, I'm most proud of this one and believe it to be the most useful.
I find that as I listen to the unique needs of my students, this site continues to grow.
I teach the Hal Leonard guitar method to all my young students. Books take you from the very beginning and give you a solid foundation for further learning. Books aren't dependent on your wifi working the way a website is. When you learn from a book, it's just you, the book, and the guitar. If Youtube or Reddit is one click away, that makes it easier to get distracted.
Adult students are harder, they often already know the basics and have knowledge gaps I need to fill in. Usually, they know what they want to learn on the instrument already and want help achieving more specific goals that I probably don't have the perfect book for. I think having online tools I can create for them helps me teach and provides value. If I've given a lecture to a student that came from my own mind, they have no way to review it. So I decided to create interactive lessons.
Books have a flaw - you can't hear them. It's nice to provide a button someone can click to immediately hear an example and understand it.
The larger this website grows, the more intimidating it becomes. Some people just want relaxed and easy going lessons. When you come to my site, there's a guitar player of the week, there's lessons, there's exercises, there's a blog. This site will only continue to grow. I always want my students to feel like we're going at the pace that's right for them and everything on the site is optional. My worry is that they might feel overwhelmed by it.
Obviously, I feel having this site is better than not having it - given that if you're reading this, it's still live. I just want to make sure that everything I put on here helps my students and isn't just me pushing too much on to them.