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Many of you are familiar with some of my writing on early childhood education. Here, someone I’ve chatted with explains at some length her process for helping her children acquire absolute pitch. This is something possible for almost everyone during a narrow window of time; it and similar time-sensitive skills are worth serious consideration if you are a parent of a young child.
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Notes -
I should clarify that when I said etudes I meant the kind of stuff you assign someone with no prior experience the first couple weeks they have their instrument. The goal at that point is simply to get sound out of it (if it's a wind instrument), familiarize them with where the notes are (and you aren't going to start with more than about five), and learn how to read music. These etudes are basically just lines of whole notes or quarter notes or whatever with some rests mixed in. By the third week, though, most beginning books will shift over to simple, familiar tunes and stay there for a while. For old times sake I pulled out my old method books and my first assignment was on 11/30/94, and I was assigned Mary Had a Little Lamb on 12/8/1994. I finished that book in a little over 2 months and moved on to playing books that were mostly etudes.
The problem isn't so much with root position chords in and of themselves, it's with the "Play the Piano Overnight" style of teaching that has people convinced they can play an instrument because they can play a few basic chords behind a melody, abetted by the fact that when you look up music for a lot of these songs on the internet or elsewhere you get basic chord strumming rather than the original part, which actually takes a decent amount of skill to play in many cases. When I was in college you could take music lessons for credit and covered by tuition. I took trumpet which wasn't a problem but they had strict criteria for who could take guitar because a lot of people would sign up thinking free guitar lessons and then wash out when they found out they actually had to read music and play real stuff and not just strum chords or play basic riffs. Becoming proficient at an instrument takes years of hard work and practice, and there's something kind of cheap about strumming a few basic chords that I can tell you the fingerings for (and I don't even own a guitar let alone claim to be able to play one), and while the effect is democratizing to an extent one can't help but wonder if these people are shortchanging themselves.
A man once wanted to learn to play the bass, so he went to a teacher. First lesson they learned to play the open E string, just plucking the string, nothing else. Second lesson they learned to play the open A string, again just plucking the string, nothing else. The third lesson they were supposed to learn the D string in a similar manner, but the student never showed up again.
The teacher bumped into the man on the street one day by chance and asked him: "Why don't you want to learn the bass any more? Was it not a suitable instrument for you?". The student replied: "No, it's nothing like that. I just haven't had time to come to lessons because I have so many paying gigs now."
Now that is a joke, but it can show a different perspective on things.
You can spend six months learning basic chords on the guitar and afterwards you can sing simple songs and accompany yourself on the guitar. At that point other people might want to listen to you, and there is a small chance you might even get paid doing it. Alternatively you can spend six months learning some kinds of finger exercises, but at that point nobody will want to listen to you, and you have to wonder if you wasted your time. So maybe it makes sense to build the minimum viable product first and then add the bells and whistles later, if you think you need them.
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