As a music educator who reads MET, you have probably become increasingly aware of the advantages of keyboard labs. However, while keyboard labs are terrific teaching tools, don't overlook the incredible potential of electric-guitar labs. With so many students interested in playing guitar, these labs represent an untapped opportunity for school music programs (see the sidebar “How Many Guitar Programs?”).

To give you a broad overview of the positive results that many music educators are getting from their guitar programs, I interviewed music teachers and administrators from an elementary school in New York City, a middle school in the Los Angeles area, and a magnet high school in Nashville. All are public-school programs that have integrated guitar labs thanks to the generosity of the VH1 Save the Music Foundation (see the sidebar “Saving the Music”). All have experienced significant student improvement and have enjoyed noteworthy parental and administrative support, as a result of the overall quality of their programs and faculty and the way they have used technology.

I'll start by discussing the scene in New York, and then talk about what's happening in Southern California. I'll finish up with a look at the heartland of Tennessee.

Wonderful things are happening at Glen Oaks Elementary School, PS115Q, in Floral Park, Queens, New York. While visiting the program, I stumbled upon a real success story. “Our test scores are up,” states principal James J. Ambrose. “I attribute a good portion of this success to two things in particular: good classroom teachers and a great arts program.” That statement is a very bold one to make; many of us wish an administrator could say the same about schools in our districts, and Ambrose made it with confidence and a big smile. He had excellent reasons to be pleased.

Glen Oaks School has a student body of 500 in grades K-5 and has seen significant development in recent years. Ambrose has been Glen Oaks' principal for the past three years, and Marc Ciprut has been teaching music there for two years. About a year and a half ago, the VH1 Save the Music Foundation donated an electric-guitar lab grant, leading to a new, required electric-guitar component in the school's music curriculum.

FIG. 1: Glen Oaks teacher Marc Ciprut’s background as a professional guitarist is a tremendous plus for his students.

I've been in countless schools, yet from the moment I walked in the door of PS115Q, I sensed that something special was going on. As I walked down the hall from the main office to Ciprut's music room, I checked out the bulletin boards and peeked into classrooms, as I often do on a visit. I heard electric guitar and singing that sounded so good I thought it was a recording. I got to the end of the hall and made the right turn into room 123, and there was Ciprut, playing guitar through an amp, rehearsing with a student vocalist. He wrapped up the rehearsal with a couple of comments about a key change in the tune and when their next rehearsal would be, and then welcomed me in for a chat about his program.

Glen Oaks School is Ciprut's first teaching assignment. In addition to being the school's music teacher, he is a gigging guitarist and producer (see Fig. 1). You might assume that, as a professional guitarist and teacher, it was Ciprut who sought out PS115Q because of its grant for an electric-guitar lab. Not so — in a fortunate twist of fate, he stumbled into a great opportunity.

PS115Q offers music to all of its students. The second graders sing, third graders play recorder, and fourth- and fifth graders play guitar. According to Ciprut, the program had approximately 150 guitar players in the spring of 2006, which was the second year that the guitar lab had been offered.

The music classroom is spacious and well designed for lectures, with plenty of chairs at one end of the room, facing a blackboard. To the side of the room, near a long row of windows looking out on the school playground, is the 16-station SoundTree electric-guitar lab provided by the VH1 Save the Music Foundation. Behind the chairs is plenty of space for standing and singing, movement, and more.

Major goals for the fourth-grade guitar lab are called building blocks and include knowing about the guitar neck and strings (all notes on each string up to the 12th fret), basic open chords, barre chords, pentatonic scales (no major scales yet), reading and writing on the treble clef (no tablature), and general theory.

The fifth-grade students focus on performance — specifically, more chords, complete major scales, performance techniques, musicianship, soloing and comping, and ensemble playing. The fifth graders also perform in two concerts and some special shows.

FIG. 2: Ciprut observes his students from behind the 16-station SoundTree electric-guitar lab. The Korg ToneWorks Pandora PX4 effects processors on the front of each station allow students to get a powerful tone without using a guitar amp.

Ciprut uses primarily his own written classroom lessons and printed materials. He also takes advantage of the 21^st Century Guitar Method (Warner Bros. Publications, 2003), which was provided along with the electric-guitar lab.

Glen Oaks' electric-guitar lab is a complete system, with Fender Squire electric guitars that are networked together using a Korg GEC3 Group Education Controller. This system is self-contained, complete with furniture that integrates a built-in music stand and a hook, and monitor speakers.

Believe it or not, the lab requires no guitar amplifiers. Blasphemous, you say? Or just plain lame? How can students learn to play and practice the electric guitar without an amp? Because the guitar lab has Korg ToneWorks PX4 and PX4B Pandora multieffects processors for guitar and bass, respectively (see Fig. 2). The Pandoras provide software-based models that emulate rock and jazz amplifiers, allowing students to get convincing amp sounds and tones through the Korg GEC system's headset microphones. In addition, the Pandoras serve as tuners and have rhythm and bass grooves in a variety of styles that are ideal for practicing. They also have a Phrase Trainer sampling feature that allows students to capture and play along with phrases they or their teacher play.

The absence of amplifiers is a big plus. You can imagine the complaints you'd get from teachers up and down your hall, particularly in neighboring rooms, if you had 16 or more electric guitarists playing through practice amps in your music classroom. Group electric guitar with amps just isn't a practical option in most schools. That said, Ciprut is lucky to have great support from his administrators and fellow teachers, and his classroom has enough practice amps for students to sometimes play live in the room, allowing them to work on tone and ensemble techniques.

I asked Ciprut for examples of what went well in the past school year and what the challenges were. He smiled and immediately identified his blues unit as both an outstanding success and a big challenge. Why a challenge? “My expectations weren't high enough,” he explained. “It blew me away! It made me a better teacher.”

Ciprut had no idea how engaged his students would become in the genre. They learned about the history of the blues, making plenty of connections to social studies, including discussions of slavery in the United States. Most amazing were the skills and materials the students covered, such as blues forms and variations, chord substitutions, soloing, bends and expression, and the detail of their improvisations in live performance.

When asked about changes in individual students, Ciprut and Ambrose independently shared stories about the same student, a ten-year-old who was in the fifth grade. This boy has blossomed in the eyes of his teachers, other students, and his parents. Interestingly, his mother plays acoustic guitar and was overwhelmed with the changes in her son's confidence and increased interest in music after entering fifth grade. Ciprut is convinced that the electric guitar made the difference.

FIG. 3: Although Christopher Columbus Middle School teacher Monique Brusca’s major instrument is clarinet, the veteran educator is also a guitarist and has taught the instrument for eight years.

There are many more such examples. My favorite comment from a parent that Ciprut shared during our visit was, “I can't believe my kid can sit there (on stage) and focus and concentrate!” Parents turn out in droves for Ciprut's winter and end-of-the-year concerts. (To hear what the PS115Q guitar students sound like, see Web Example 1, recorded at the winter 2005 concert.)

Monique Brusca (see Fig. 3) has taught music for 14 years at Christopher Columbus Middle School in Canoga Park, California, which is in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Guitar is not Brusca's major instrument; she is a music-education and clarinet major from UCLA and learned to play classical guitar at the Colbrin School of Performing Arts, UCLA's community school. She has taught guitar for eight years and teaches instrumental music, including a full orchestra, beginning strings, and band.

Brusca's school is another VH1 Save the Music Foundation electric-guitar lab recipient (see Fig. 4). Unlike Ciprut's PS115Q program, Brusca's program already had acoustic guitars, but the electric guitars add a new dimension.

I had the pleasure of meeting Brusca in January 2006, when three of her most improved students came to the Winter NAMM show (a major music-products trade show in Anaheim, California). This trio had the opportunity to play from the NAMM show floor for VH1's Top 20 Video Countdown, and was part of the cable-television broadcast the following week.

FIG. 4: Each station at Christopher Columbus Middle School’s SoundTree electric-guitar lab features a Fender Squire guitar, a Korg ToneWorks Pandora PX4 effects processor, a stand, and an audio interface for the Korg GEC3 controller that networks all of the stations.

Christopher Columbus Middle School is a medical, math, and science magnet with an enrollment of nearly 1,500 students. About 70 percent of the students are Hispanic, of which a high percentage are learning English as a second language (ESL). Guitar classes are offered on an elective basis to seventh- and eighth graders only, and students can't register for guitar until they've passed ESL requirements.

Last school year, for the first time, Brusca ran the guitar elective as a full-year course, with 22 students enrolled. In previous years guitar classes had up to 33 students per semester, but with just 16 student guitars in the lab, such a large enrollment was unmanageable.

With older students in an elective course in which both acoustic and electric guitars are taught, Brusca's goals at Christopher Columbus are different from Ciprut's at Glen Oaks. Her students' major goal is to compose a song, to which end they learn to read treble staff and tablature, master chords (from basic to barre to power chords), practice fingerpicking and strumming styles, and participate in ensemble and individual practice and performance.

There is a 90-minute-per-week practice requirement for the class, and the culminating year-end activity is collaboratively writing and performing a class song. The class song and other pieces are performed at a year-end concert. Last year, more than 300 parents, family, and community members attended. (A score of the 2006 class song, “The Tie That Binds Our Loved Ones,” can be downloaded from the MET Web site; see Web Example 2.)

Support from the school and community is evident, and the program also has received critical district-level support from LAUSD's central offices. When asked why the guitar-grant resources were directed to Christopher Columbus Middle School, district K-12 music advisor Steve Venz explains, “It was important to put the lab into a school where the music teacher could use it to its full capacity.” Because of the tremendous success demonstrated by the first students who had access to these new tools, the lab, says Venz, “is connecting music education to what students see and experience in their lives and in popular culture while connecting to the standards that music-education research has proven important.”

After observing Brusca's clear command of group guitar-instruction techniques, I asked her if there were any key experiences — in-service or preservice — that contributed to her teaching skills. “I couldn't have done it without GAMA [www.discoverguitar.com],” she says. Indeed, this organization of guitar and guitar-accessory manufacturers supports and finances several projects, including International Guitar Month and a new California-based program called Guitar in the Classroom. GAMA is also a partner in an important initiative known as the Guitar Education Network (see the sidebar “Using the Network”).

The Metropolitan Nashville Public School system has guitar programs at elementary and secondary levels, and the renowned Nashville School of the Arts (NSA) high school provides a high-level, culminating experience in guitar instruction.

FIG. 5: Nashville School of the Arts guitar teacher James Satterwhite (left) and former Blue Merle guitarist Luke Reynolds (right) are all smiles, as Reynolds provides the NSA kids with a wonderful guitar master class.

NSA has developed a substantial guitar program under James Satterwhite's leadership, educating nearly 140 guitar students in the 2005-2006 school year. For years students worked in large and small ensembles under Satterwhite's mentorship, but it wasn't until this year that the program had an electric-guitar lab. This year, because of a VH1 Save the Music Foundation donation and financial support from the Nashville Alliance for the Arts, NSA was able to obtain a 16-station electric-guitar lab. As with the program at Christopher Columbus Middle School, Satterwhite is now integrating new technology tools such as the Korg GEC3 Group Education Controller, the Korg ToneWorks Pandora multieffects processors, and the Tascam CD players into the lab.

To launch NSA's electric-guitar lab in November 2005, the school brought together national and local music-industry and -education supporters of Satterwhite's program for an exhilarating learning experience — an artist master class. This wasn't the first master class for the school's guitar program, but it was special because it was the first major teaching event in the new lab. NSA's master classes have three primary goals: to give students access to an artist who discusses his personal successes and career challenges; to allow students to play and get feedback from the artist; and to create a forum for community members to learn about what's happening in music education in their city schools. The November 2005 event accomplished all three goals.

FIG. 6: During his master class at NSA, guitarist Luke Reynolds often jumped in and played with students, suggesting that they play while he backed them up.”

The special master class featured Luke Reynolds (see Fig. 5), an up-and-coming guitarist and singer-songwriter with the recently disbanded group Blue Merle. Reynolds, who studied at Belmont University and has deep Nashville roots, was in town to play a benefit gig. With lots of recent studio and touring experience, he was in his element. He spent a great deal of time sharing his experience with the students and obviously enjoyed listening to and playing with them. Using the Korg GEC3 lab controller, Reynolds listened to individual and group practices, freely commenting on student performances (see Fig. 6). He frequently jumped in and played with students, suggesting, “You play, and I'll back you up.”

The new learning environment definitely engaged the students. One event attendee who is a member of the press said, “The most impressive aspect of the day was that more than an hour after the master class ended, the students were still in the lab.”

Commenting in a recent interview for soundtree.com, Satterwhite gave his veteran teacher's perspective on the benefits of lab-based guitar instruction. “The lab allows me to organize the class to make group learning one segment of the program, instead of the main teaching focus,” he says. “Guitarists are always on different levels, and the lab allows more advanced students to continue practicing while I work one-on-one with other students. The monitoring feature can be used to make certain that students are on-task. The lab has greatly improved my students' ability to sight-read and play with tracks. My students who have auditioned for guitar scholarships have all gotten high marks in sight-reading this year.”

The success of the programs at PS115Q, Christopher Columbus Middle School, and the Metropolitan Nashville Schools is an indicator that students and parents will welcome guitar instruction.

As a music educator, if you have reasonable guitar skills or are a guitarist by trade, you should consider enhancing and growing your program by adding a guitar component to your curriculum. This article gives you a number of resources that will help you begin making a program proposal, including success stories, curriculum and professional development resources, and even potential funding sources. Visit the GAMA, MENC, and the VH1 Save the Music Foundation Web sites, connect with other educators who teach guitar, and start a program. Adding guitar instruction to your school's curriculum will absolutely bring students to your music classroom who didn't participate before.

Lee Whitmore is a graduate of Columbia University Teachers College and West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the managing director of SoundTree, Korg USA's education division, and is treasurer for the Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME). He was vice president for education at Cablevision Systems Corporation's Power to Learn from 1999 to 2003. Contact him at leew@soundtree.com.

Given music-industry sales figures over the past few years, the guitar is clearly the most popular consumer musical instrument. But are music educators capitalizing on strong interest in guitar to engage more students and lifelong learners in music making?

Spending intensive time examining the three programs in this article prompted me to ask how many guitar programs exist in public education in the United States. So I wrote Mike Blakeslee, executive deputy director of the Music Educators National Conference (MENC), and asked him what MENC knows about its membership and guitar education. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that in April of 2006, MENC posed to its members a Question of the Month about the role that guitar instruction had in their music programs.

I learned that just 4,726 MENC members (8 percent) have indicated that teaching guitar is one of their areas of interest. Here are some highlights from the 310 informal online survey responses at www.menc.org.

• 37% of respondents indicated their school has a guitar curriculum
• 30% of those schools feature guitar as a regular curricular offering, part of the normal course work

Of those respondents who don't have a guitar program

• 29% believe administrators and students would welcome it
• 22% believe students would welcome it but aren't sure about their administration

The VH1 Save the Music Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring instrumental music education in America's public schools. Its goal is to raise awareness about the importance of music as a part of each child's complete education.

Since 1997 the VH1 Save the Music Foundation has provided more than $30 million worth of new musical instruments to over 1,200 schools in 80 communities, affecting the lives of more than 700,000 public-school children. MET spotlighted five VH1-assisted programs in “How VH1 Helps Save School Music” in the November/December 2004 issue.

For more information on the Foundation, visit www.vh1savethemusic.com.

Since 1994, the Guitar and Accessories Marketing Association (GAMA), MENC, and International Music Products Association (NAMM) have operated the Guitar Education Network, a joint task force aimed at developing public-school guitar programs. Key to this initiative are yearly summer workshops about teaching guitar, held in many locations around the United States (see www.guitaredunet.org).

Led by master guitar teachers, the workshops inform in-service music educators how to hone skills and develop techniques appropriate for teaching secondary-school group guitar classes. According to Bob Morris, Fender Musical Instruments' director of education and one of the workshop instructors, more than 1,300 music educators have participated to date. Morris participated in a workshop as a student in 1996, interned in the program in 1997, and subsequently became an instructor.

“Guitar teachers struggle with not having rock-solid lesson plans,” Morris explained. To address this, Teaching Guitar workshops feature effective modeling of at least 20, and sometimes more than 25, lessons from all the major method books, including those from Hal Leonard, Warner Bros., Mel Bay, and Alfred.