Essay: Is It Possible To Learn The Guitar Despite A Physical, Cognitive, Or Learning Handicap?

My teacher, Jamie Andreas, based on her 35+ years of guitar pedagogy research and experimentation, often says that the most important factor that determines how well a student will learn guitar is that student's desire to do so. Love of the guitar, and the desire to play, can cause people to overcome many obstacles in the same way that the desire to play a sport or to climb a mountain can allow a person to find ways to achieve their goals. As part of my own business strategy, I have had occasion to test Jamie's conclusion. This essay contains a general outline as to whom I can teach, and whom I cannot teach.

Before deciding to offer a money-back guarantee, I first ran a series of experiments to determine whether I could offer the guarantee right across the board for all students regardless of disability, or if I needed to tailor my guarantee to exclude people with physical, cognitive, or learning impairments. I taught a gentleman who'd run his hand through a table saw and chopped off two fingers of his pick hand, which had since been re-attached. He wanted to play fingerstyle. I taught some young adults with autistic spectrum disorder. The results exceeded my wildest dreams.

It turns out that the only attributes strictly necessary for playing the guitar are hearing, two hands with a thumb and at least one finger apiece, the use of one's arms, and most importantly the desire to play the guitar. Everything else is optional.

Sensory disabilities

Eyesight is optional when making music, but that should not be a surprise because there have been many successful blind musicians. Ray Charles, Johann Sebastian Bach, Stevie Wonder, and the Blind Boys of Alabama come to mind. Not all these musicians went blind as adults. Ray Charles went blind as a child, long before his musical education was complete. Of course, since playing guitar is a physical activity, a student who cannot see examples or make corrections visually must be guided by a sense of touch. He or she will have to be able to tolerate me physically moving his or her fingers and hands around. Songs will be learned chiefly by rote, and a conventional metronome with non-raised markings will not be practical.

Students do need to be able to hear. Beethoven is famous for composing and conducting his Ninth Symphony after becoming profoundly deaf, but he didn't start losing his hearing until his career was well established. A rudimentary sense of pitch is important: if I play two different notes, you have to be able to tell the difference between one and the other, and be able to say which one is "higher". Aside from that, you don't need a fantastic sense of pitch because it will develop over time. Don't worry if you can't carry a tune: the famous music educator David Lucas Burge has divided the "sense" of pitch into separate and mostly unrelated skills: pitch awareness, pitch identification, and pitch control. For me to be able to teach you, all you need is very rudimentary pitch awareness. The rest, we can build in.

Hand injuries

Jimi Hendrix played the guitar with his teeth and occasionally his tongue. It's also possible to get a sound out of the guitar with one's feet. Yet most people play with their hands, so you need to have at least partial use of both hands and arms. You need to be able to grasp a pick and control the angle of the pick on the string, and you need to be able to press down at least one string with the finger of your fret hand in order to fret a note. Generally this is done by pressing against the back of the guitar neck with the thumb or the heel of the hand.

The optimal, ergonomically efficient "correct" technique has been developed for people with normal body movement. If you have a hand or finger injury that impairs your movement, this optimal technique must be adjusted. It's impossible to use a finger that's missing, but you can often substitute another finger and change the fingering. Django Reinhardt, for example, is famous for adjusting his technique to compensate for the loss of two fingers on his fretting hand. Even without those fingers he still played guitar at the world-class level. Tommy Iommi had a missing finger, and Angus Young once broke a finger on his fretting hand while on tour. Instead of canceling the tour, he used the finger splint as a slide and played slide guitar.

In very extreme cases, an injury or illness such as arthritis may limit the styles you can play, and if you don't have enough fingers you may be locked out of the most advanced professional repertoire. Yet the vast majority of popular and folk music will still be very playable.

Playing the guitar, when done correctly and in an ergonomically appropriate way, does not cause pain or injury. It will not cause carpal tunnel syndrome or arthritis. However, in some people who already have carpal tunnel syndrome or arthritis it will aggravate an existing condition. So if you already have carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis, or any other disorder that affects your hands and arms, or if you have been in pain and think you might have such a problem, consult your doctor before taking guitar lessons from me or anybody else. If, after trying the guitar with a competent teacher, the basic movements needed to play with minimum tension still cause you pain, stop.

Cognitive impairment

There are many ways to learn to play the guitar. In a lesson with me, you'll learn partly by watching and imitating me, partly by following verbal directions, partly by rote, and partly by me grabbing your fingers and moving them into position. The ability to understand spoken English and to process verbal commands is therefore not 100% necessary at the beginner level provided you can watch and imitate. The ability to see is not 100% necessary if you follow verbal instructions well and are OK with me grabbing and rearranging your fingers.

As part of the research I did prior to offering my money-back guarantee, I gave guitar lessons to some autistic students. Autism is a spectrum disorder, so it's possible to be so autistic you can't speak or respond to verbal instructions, and it's also possible to be "high-functioning', which means you process information a bit differently than normal people but can speak, reason, and interact with others. I found that, particularly at the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, when I used Jamie's Principles method of instruction there was no meaningful difference between autistic and non-autistic teens in terms of the rate at which they learned the guitar. Those who were interested in the guitar and who wanted to play learned very quickly. In fact, a motivated autistic student can often exploit his or her superior concentration skills and attention to detail in a way that is not instinctive or natural to people with mainstream cognition.

At the extremely autistic end of the spectrum, progress was slow but it did exist. I only had extremely poor results with one young autistic woman who was capable of walking and understanding simple verbal instructions, although she could not speak or make eye contact. She was not particularly interested in the guitar. She never touched the guitar except in lessons, and although she seemed to enjoy the sound and the attention while the lessons were in progress, she did not seek out the guitar on her own. Without the basic desire to play the guitar, I can't teach anyone.

On the whole, if there's someone inside that body who likes the sound the guitar makes and wants to play the guitar, I can generally get to him or her. There's no guarantee that progress will be as fast or reliable as someone who doesn't have a communication or cognitive issue. The key factor is not the impairment but the desire to play the guitar and the ability to follow through and practice the guitar when I am not in the room.

A hyperactive student generally settles down when I give him (or her) something difficult to do, and a student who has difficulty concentrating is invariably taught to do so when I keep returning his or her attention to the task at hand. Such a student generally has trouble following through or practicing at home, since I have yet to see the parents or guardians of such a child provide the kind of instant feedback and correction I provide in a lesson.

There's one thing I ought to make clear: learning to play the guitar, or taking lessons from me, does not make a student less autistic, nor does it cure attention deficit disorder. I've studied a little bit about how to teach autistic and Asperger's Syndrome students, but I am not a doctor or therapist. Nor do I have any formal background in any aspect of autism research or treatment. I've heard anecdotal descriptions of music being a second verbal pathway, but I've got no way of assessing the truth of the stories I've read. So I'm not in a position to offer "music therapy". I'm not even certain exactly what it is.

Developmental delays or learning disabilities

A developmental delay affects the way a person absorbs information and retains it. People with learning disabilities will take longer to make progress on the guitar, just as they will take longer to make progress in school. They will require more review in order to retain what they now, and they will need more practice, and more applied practice, than an average person. In some of the more "intellectual" styles such as jazz, beyond the beginner level music theory becomes important. That is where learning disabilities often have enough of an impact to create a permanent upper limit to a person's development.

That being said, people of unusually high intelligence are more likely to multi-task while doing repetitive activities such as driving or practicing scales. That is one reason they are more prone to accidents. A person with an IQ of 75 who applies his or her entire attention to repeating an exercise, and who sticks with it instead of thinking about something else, who follows instructions instead of trying to second-guess the teacher or the book, and whose intellect does not tempt him or her to take shortcuts, will get farther on the guitar, in less time, than a person with an IQ of 150 who can grasp the theory immediately but who is not disposed to spend the time or energy building the physical skills to put that theory into practice.

A good, perceptive, analytical mind is useful when analyzing what's wrong with a particular chord, and when watching oneself for signs of bad form. A person with significant developmental delay may not have much capacity for self-monitoring or deductive or inductive reasoning. That makes self-monitoring much more difficult, so it means that as a teacher I have to work harder and provide more timely feedback. I also have to teach more by rote and imitation than through logic, and I focus very little on reading music or on music theory. Therefore, over time a student can still learn how to play at least some songs to the basic to intermediate level.

What really does keep a person from learning the guitar?

In terms of physical impairments, I can test for true tone-deafness in a few minutes. For a student with movement impairments, the test is to get the student seated with the guitar, holding it, and strumming in time with a beat. If I can't get that far in half an hour, odds are I won't get anywhere in the long term either.

If I can't get through to a student in a lesson well enough to get him or her to follow simple instructions such as "freeze", "look at this finger", or "relax your shoulder", and if I can't get the student to imitate me, then we're sunk because I can't get through to that student. There is such thing as a cognitive or developmental impairment that severe.

I also need some reasonable assurance that the student will practice at least some of what he or she learns in the lesson. I write assignments into a notebook, and students are free to tape record or videotape their lessons with me for review later. But nothing I can do will make the student crack open that notebook and do the exercises. Similarly, the student's got to follow my instructions.

For anything short of the above problems, a strong desire will allow the student to eventually overcome the problems. But without the desire to play the guitar (which is not something I can test for in an interview or lesson), no amount of effort from me will cause the student to advance.