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Tonight I'm teaching guitar (and guitar pedagogy) to the NYU music ed students. I'm planning to devote the entire time to the right hand, to rhythm.
In the internet age, you do not need a teacher to show you where to put your left hand fingers for chords and scales. It's on umpteen web sites. For example, for scales, just consult the excellent Guitar Dashboard by @mikehadlow. https://guitardashboard.com/
A teacher can spend ten minutes showing you how to not grip the guitar like an axe handle and then send you home to learn your chord fingerings on your own time. The thing you need a live teacher for is the right hand, the rhythm.
Playing guitar with good time isn't just about the note onsets, when the pick or fingernails make contact with the strings. It's also about note endings. And this is a thing that is really hard to teach yourself.
You need to carefully control how long each note or chord sustains through a combination of left hand and right hand muting. Its a subtle art, but it's the difference between sounding like a chump and sounding like a musician.
Listen to Bob Marley or Neil Young play acoustic guitar. They're playing the same standard fifteen chords in the same strummy patterns as the randoms at open mic night. So why do they sound so much better? It's because they have excellent control over their time and groove.
So, tonight we're going to groove out to some breakbeats. Should be a fun time.
If you're a beginner, you can make things easier on yourself by practicing the one-note groove. Pick a string, say, the low E, put on a drum loop, and play that one open string for as long as you can stand it.
Focus on your time, your sound, your pick angle, your sustain. Try locking in with the kick drum, with the snare drum, with the hi-hat. This is not just for beginners! Guitarists at any level can benefit from this.
It's useful to do it alone, but it's even better to do it with a teacher, because the teacher can put some chords and riffs on top and make it sound like actual music.
