Lessons by Howard:
Not long after I taught myself to fingerpick and had dropped out of Berklee School of Music, someone asked, “Could you teach me how you do that??” At that moment I realized two things: I could do something that others wanted to learn, and I had no idea how to explain what I was doing.
Being dyslexic and ADD, my previous experiences with learning violin, French horn and piano were frustrating at best. It was a constant “Can you play that for me so I can hear how it goes?”
For better or worse, I taught myself how to play guitar; and along the way, I made my “own rules,” so to speak. It was through this experience that I came to teach fingerstyle, open-tunings and bottleneck the best way I know how: through demonstration, linear explanation and video.
“Fingerpicking is nothing more than ‘notes in order’”......I don’t know if anyone else ever said or thought that; but when I came to that simple realization, I knew I could teach what I play.
I do not use tablature or standard notation as you may have guessed by now!
