Resources for teaching musicians

I usually focus on the performance side of being a musician. The gear, the gigs, and the recording aspects of life as a gigging guitar player. Today I thought I'd throw out a few tools for those who teach as well. Many guitar players rely on teaching for income as much or more than gigging so I thought I would touch on some things that I found that might be helpful.

Blank sheet music is a staple of music teachers. We would all love it if our students showed up with their own but we know that doesn't always happen. Here are a few resources to create and print your own as well as some other great tools to help you and your students make music.

Blanksheetmusic.net offers a great tool to generate traditional staff paper. The interface allows for time signature, Key signature, Tab, as well as many other options. Just set it up and print or download for future use. You have to set up an account to save your sheets and download but it is free so why not.

scribd.com has a really good looking blank chord graph as well as a pro tabs sheet which has chord graphs and lines for any text. Great for putting the basic chord structure on the graph and lyrics down below.

riff-o-matic.com has a good basic fretboard note chart. I had a pencil drawn one back when I was learning guitar and it was a very valuable tool.

celticguitarmusic.com has all sorts of resources for musicians. They have blank tab, blank sheet music,fretboard diagrams, and a ton of other music related resources. A site like this is a must visit and bookmark.

band-collab.net has an ASCII tab generator. Click your mouse on the line to designate the fret number and soon you have a riff in ASCII tab.

autotransposer.com is a very cool key transposer. Enter your chord progression and it will give you various transpositions. I generally suggest that musicians learn to transpose on their own but this is a great shortcut if you have a new song for the set that you need to get into a key that the singer can sing.

guitarteacherworld.com has a lot of great graphs, charts, lessons, and info for guitar teachers. I know you all probably have you own methods and favorite tools but I think this site can be very helpful for anyone who teaches guitar. Sometimes just having a look at some other material may motivate or inspire you.

I applaud anyone who teaches music. It is becoming a thing of the past in our schools and I truly believe that kids lives are better with music. I hope some of these tools will be helpful to you in your teaching endeavors.

Scott