By: Dr Matt Warnock
The National Guitar Workshop, founded in 1983 by Dave Smolover, has grown from its humble roots in South Kent, Connecticut to become one of the leading guitar education programs in the country. The NGW has built its reputation by providing guitarists the chance to study with some of the top names in the guitar world in an educational, though relaxed, environment. Students who attend any of the Workshop’s week-long sessions will spend time each day in clinics with legendary players, jamming alongside fellow musicians of similar levels and musical tastes and receiving one-on-one instruction from highly-qualified private teachers, basically eating and sleeping guitar for the entire length of the workshop.
Though there are many summer guitar camps and courses offered each year throughout North America, few can compare to the NGW’s diverse range of world-class, and often legendary, guitar faculty. The NGW offers students of any genre and background the chance to study with some of the top players in their fields. This past summer clinics and classes were taught by jazz legends such as Pat Metheny and Pat Martino, shred masters Herman Lee of Dragonforce and perennial favorite Paul Gilbert; blues legends Buddy Guy and Jimmy Vaughn; and Country guitar virtuoso Brent Mason.
With a myriad of guitar workshops, clinics, camps and seminars to choose, from the National Guitar Workshop is aiming to make this decision an easy one for anyone wanting to study guitar during the summer months. The wide variety of courses and clinics, offered at campuses all over the country, allows the NGW to provide a high-quality educational experience to guitarists of all backgrounds and tastes in any region of the US.
The wide range of musical genres covered, alongside world-class guest artists and a deep dedication to the students’ educational experience, has made the NGW one of the premiere summer guitar workshops over the last 25 years, a trend that they plan to continue for many years to come.
National Guitar Workshop president Dave Smolover recently sat down with Guitar International Magazine to discuss his thoughts on modern music education, the launch of the companies new video lesson site Workshop Live and the future of the NGW as it deals with music education issues in the information age
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Larry Coryell and Tom Dempsey NGW 1984
Matt Warnock: You started up the National Guitar Workshop a little over twenty-five years ago, at a time when not a lot of other people were running similar programs. What was the initial inspiration behind starting the NGW back in 1983?
Dave Smolover: I had been teaching guitar and working as a professional musician, driving around five-hundred miles a week for gigs and lessons. My son had just been born, about a year before we started the workshop, and I was desperate to find a way to spend more time at home, but still make enough money to live off of. I had about forty hours of students and was playing in bands, and even had my own choral group, so I was spending all of my time on music.
I had a group of students from my studio who were getting to the age where they were growing out of the summer camps that their parents were sending them to. So one day I asked them “would you like to spend a week where we’d spend every evening from six to nine working on guitar?”, and they loved the idea. I figured if my students wanted to do something like that then the idea could work in a much larger environment, it just made sense to me that it could work out.
The other thing is that I was never a great jazz guitarist, or classical or blues guitarist. I was competent in many different styles, but not really a master of one, and if I had been I might have started a workshop that was strictly blues, or strictly classical etc. By opening up the workshop to students of any genre it really gave us a wider appeal to a very broad audience, something that wouldn’t have been the case if we’d decided to focus on any one type of music.
Matt: It sounds like you were heavily involved in the teaching of classes and lessons back then. Now that you’re in charge of running the whole company, do you still get a chance to teach a class or two each summer?
Dave: Unfortunately not as often as I’d like, though I do teach one class each year that deals with the music industry. I used to do sub work, when a teacher was sick I would jump in and take their class for a few days, or even a whole session, but I haven’t really taught classes for at least ten to fifteen years.
My initial idea was that I would make my yearly salary during the summer months, which would free me up to be a composer during the rest of the year. What happened was each year from year one to year five the program doubled in size, from one hundred students to a thousand.
It became a full-time job at that point, not only for me but for five people. I also began to really become interested in music education as a business, and began to see the program as my life’s work. Today, between all of our different programs, we have forty-five thousand alumni, so we’ve affected a lot of peoples’ lives, which is something I’m very proud of.
Matt: There are few college or conservatory music programs that can boast that many alumni.
Dave: Absolutely.
Matt: Speaking of college and conservatory music programs, how would you compare what you’re doing at the NGW with programs at post-secondary schools across the country, such as Julliard, the New England Conservatory or SUNY Purchase?
Dave: We’re doing two very different things, and I don’t believe we compete with anybody who’s running a collegiate level program. The students who go to get a degree in college, which I did and all of my faculty did, are committing four years and upwards of a hundred a fifty thousand dollars to receive a wonderful education that will provide them with the skills they need to potentially teach or perform. It’s a degree granting discipline that they’re involved with.
The program we offer is designed for a much broader audience. The collegiate programs are geared towards a specific age group, mostly ages eighteen to twenty-five. People who are younger can’t go because they’re still in high school, and most people older than that have jobs and so they can’t go either. We believe that we can provide a tremendously beneficial program for a short time each summer at a very affordable price for students of all ages.
Students who want to study with players like Pat Metheny, David Russell or Steve Vai have that opportunity. Students who are just beginning their study of music, but want to continue on in a collegiate level program, can start with us. Over forty percent of our high-school students end up being music majors in college, so we’re a significant feeder program for college level music programs.
Another forty percent of our students are over the age of thirty five. These are people who played music in high school or college and have gone on to make money doing something outside of music, but who still have a strong passion for music and like to spend time every summer hanging out, and playing with, other like-minded individuals.
As well, our faculty represents about twenty of the most prestigious collegiate music programs in the country, so our students get to come and experience first hand what it’s like to work with those teachers, and many of them go on to study with them further when they enter their college programs.
Many of our adult students could have been professional musicians, but they made the decision to have a steady paycheck, a nice house and a 401K. Laughs. So this is their chance to spend a week focusing on nothing but music, it’s a chance for them to feed their musical soul.
Matt: What’s funny is that your program, at least from how I see it, is actually sticking much more closely to the traditional way in which music has been taught, especially in the jazz, rock, blues and country genres, compared to how music is taught in colleges these days.
For many years, up and coming musicians would seek out one for more private teachers, take lessons from them, watch them perform, learn by hanging out with them at their gigs, and then take that knowledge and really learn by getting out and playing.
This seems to be the foundation of your program, as compared to a collegiate program which requires between four and ten years of schooling, with the students focus being pulled in many different directions, musical and otherwise. Could you comment on that statement?
Michael Hedges at NGW
Dave: You’re absolutely right, and I don’t think people really understand that, because people have been told that learning to play music has to be done a certain way. But for hundreds of years, music students have been learning differently, they have been apprenticing with a famous player or composer rather than enrolling in full-blown music programs. My music education was pretty unconventional, I went out and studied privately with four different composers across the country, which is what I wanted to do, but I also have a college degree in music.
There are plusses and minuses to the way the collegiate and conservatory music programs are set up. They do raise the bar for performance and personal expectation, but it also codify’s things that don’t necessarily need to be codified, such as jazz improvisation. Charlie Parker didn’t go to Berklee, and neither did any of his peers, but they managed to do pretty well on their own, learning from their peers rather than in a school environment.
Matt: You’re right, there have been very few players who reach Parker’s level of success that went to, or if they did graduated from, college to study music. When I think about the musician who wants to teach at his local music school or private academy and who wants to play and tour on a local and regional level, it almost makes more sense for them to study at a program like yours rather than at a university.
Trying to take on six figures of debt and then paying it off making a living playing and teaching privately can be difficult to say the least, which is what most people have to do these days in order to get a degree from a conservatory or college music program. Are you gearing your program towards this demographic, the player who wants to teach privately and perform locally and regionally?
Dave: Definitely, and we’re making some very practical decisions on how to reach those people better. Again, I think it’s absolutely essential for someone to be well trained if they want to teach, and the best training at this moment in time is the collegiate music program. However, there are huge gaps between what the professional expectation is as opposed to what people are learning.
Unfortunately, nobody picks up the guitar and says, “I want to grow up to be a guitar teacher,” they pick up the guitar to be famous, to be a star. Then there’s a point where expectation and reality begin to merge and a realization occurs that this may not be the case. In collegiate music programs, unless it’s a music Ed degree, schools are training students to become performers. Although the reality is that many, if not most, of these students will have to be able to teach at some level in order to make a living.
They’re not taught how to teach privately, how to start and run a studio, how to become a professional music educator. Because it hasn’t been their career goal, a lot of people treat teaching, at least in the beginning, pretty unprofessionally, and so they end up getting paid lousy.
It’s a catch twenty-two that really has a simple answer, schools could offer a one semester course on how to run a professional private studio, and how to teach at a professional level that goes beyond what people expect from the back of a local music store. This kind of education, I feel, is sorely lacking from today’s collegiate music programs.
Matt: Finishing up a bit on the topic of music education, there have been some rumors floating around the web that the NGW is planning on running weekend programs throughout the school year, possibly starting this year. Can you either confirm or quash these rumors?
Dave: I can confirm those rumors, and we are planning to begin offering weekend programs beginning in the spring of 2010.
Matt: Excellent. Can you elaborate on the subject matter for these clinics, when and where they’re going to be offered, that sort of thing?
Dave: Initially, they’ll be developed over the next year into a more codified program, but initially they’ll be offered as three different programs in the areas of jazz, blues and rock. The first program will be a master class with a master artist, which will be a full day of working with them in a classroom setting. For example, if you were working with Pat Martino you’d get six hours with Pat, which is a great learning experience. We’re trying to keep the costs very low for these clinics, and there will be material that people can take home with them, practice tracks and print outs, that sort of thing.
The second set of courses will be with our senior level workshop teachers and they’ll be more ensemble orientated, with a tremendous amount of playing involved. Finally, we started a course this summer which was a certificate program for private teachers. It was a week long course that talked about how to deal with problem students, how to develop a curriculum, how to market a private studio, that sort of thing. So we want to continue that program throughout the year as well if all works out.
The first two programs will be day or weekend long clinics that will be offered in specific cities throughout the U.S. The last clinic may be offered as a series of three to four day-long programs, spread out over the course of the year, where at the end of the series of clinics the participants will receive their certification.
Matt: As well as running the NGW you are also the founder and director of Workshop Live, which offers online video lessons to students all over the world. Was this a case where you had the idea for Workshop Live many years ago but the technology wasn’t up to par and you had to wait for it to catch up before you launched, or did the technology arise and it inspired you to pursue this venture?
Dave: I had the idea for Workshop Live back in 1995, I know exactly the day it happened. Laughs. One of the things that is very interesting to me is the fact that people learn differently. The person who is the perfect teacher for me may not work for you at all. Even though they may be a great player, they may not be right for me because they teach a certain way, and I learn in a different manner.
What we’ve done over the years at the NGW is to find wonderful teachers, but also teachers that were very different in their approaches. We have teachers who are very detailed oriented, teachers who use a lot of improvisation in their approach as well as people who use theory based teaching methods, so we cover a wide range of teaching approaches.
One of the things I learned during my musical education was that people learn in three different ways. They learn by seeing, by hearing and by doing. We felt that if we could bring teachers together who are gifted in those three different areas it would work great with video lessons. Music was just not meant to be taught out of a book. It’s sound for heavens sake. Laughs. We teach people to read in order so that they can learn how to play, and that has a detrimental effect on students who are certain kinds of learners.
So the concept behind Workshop Live is to have multiple teachers teaching the same content from different approaches, which is something that people can’t get from a book or a series of DVD’s. To have four teachers give twenty lessons on beginning blues would be maybe four or eight different DVD’s, depending on how rich the lessons are. Here the computer, which is simply a delivery system, opened up that possibility. We can have five, ten or even twenty teachers covering the same subject from different angles.
The students now have a wider range of choices on what they’re going to study and who they’re going to study it with. Now, having said that, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to pull off and it gets very expensive to keep up and running rather quickly.
Matt: Being a music educator myself I have to ask this question. What would you say to the person who teaches privately, maybe in a smaller market, and all of a sudden Workshop Live launches and their students can now study with these amazing teachers, at a very low cost, and may feel they don’t need to take private lessons with that teacher anymore?
How would you calm the fears of some of these teachers who are looking at your website and seeing their income slipping away as more people sign up to take video lessons at Workshop Live?
Dave: It’s really an interesting concern, but at the same time there really is no concern. If I had this concern myself, when I started Workshop Live I would have had to make the choice to start the website but kill the NGW, since all of those students would just take the video lessons and stop coming to our summer programs.
I am very much of the mind that there is a humongous limitation when any kind of information transfer takes the two communicating parties out of the same room. I don’t believe that any method used to deliver this information remotely will ever take the place of direct human interaction and communication.
Matt: So you’re thinking of it, and maybe even marketing it, as a supplement to private lessons, not a replacement.
Dave: Absolutely, it’s a book on steroids, that all it is.
Matt: That’s a great way to think of it. The information is the same as one would get in a method book, but technology has changed to the point where you can offer more information, in a different delivery vehicle, at a cheaper price. But the idea behind the material is the same as it was with books.
Dave: I wish it was more, but in the private lesson environment, about a third of the time is spent on music and the other two thirds is human interaction. For adults who take private lessons this may be the only time in their week where they get to do what they want to do, rather than do what’s required of them from their work and home responsibilities.
For a young student, it’s the only time in their educational experience where they have a relationship with an adult that is specifically based upon their needs, and a unique communication dynamic occurs. This is extremely important, and no matter how great the online lessons may be, it’s still secondary communication, it’s not primary.
In a few years the technology will be better and people will be able to study in real time with great players all over the words via video to video lessons, but there’s still a separation between student and teacher. I really liked the term you used, it’s a supplement not a replacement. I mean, students can go to YouTube right now and get every song they’ve ever wanted to learn, every technique they need to have in order to play guitar, it’s all at their fingertips and free.
But besides the downturn in the economy I haven’t heard of any private teacher suffering because of this new technology. People still want that one-on-one attention from a real life person, and I think it will always be that way, at least in regards to learning to play an instrument.
Matt: Now that you’ve been building and running the NGW, and the other business associated with it, for more than twenty-five years, did you ever envision that this is where it would all lead when you first started the company those many years ago?
Dave: I wish I could say that I could have see this all coming, but no. It was all organic. The publishing wing of what we do rose out of a need to have personalized content for our summer students, and it grew from there. The Day Jams program we run, which we’re really proud of, grew out of a single course we use to offer at our summer program. We offered it once and the response was overwhelming, so it really grew out of that small course into a much bigger thing.
Back when I first started the workshop I didn’t have any plans to take over the world or anything. I just started with one idea, made it happen, and the rest grew from there.
Photos courtesy of the National Guitar Workshop’s photo archive.
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Links
National Guitar Workshop Homepage
The Ultimate Guitar Scale Bible: National Guitar Workshop
