Tell Us a Story: TheToneKing.com sits down with Jerry Wyatt and talks about “Learn Guitar Fast and Easy.”
Marc Johnson | Dec 05, 2013 | Comments 6
Tell Us a Story: TheToneKing.com sits down with Jerry Wyatt and talks about “Learn Guitar Fast and Easy.”
By Marc Johnson for TheToneKing.com
“You can learn something from anybody,” Jerry Wyatt pointed out in a recent interview with TheToneKing.com. To emphasize his point, he talked about his 8 yr. old student, Little Oliver, who often made unconventional mistakes when he was playing his scales. Jerry noticed that, even though they were unintentional, Little Oliver’s mistakes were creating unique sounds that sounded pretty cool. At the end of the day, Jerry would end up trying to reproduce those sounds when he got home. Like he said, “You can learn something from anybody.” And that’s exactly why Jerry Wyatt put out the “Learn Guitar Fast and Easy” lesson program.
Jerry’s been playing since he was around nine years old when his father bestowed on him his first guitar. Listening to his stories about growing up in Huntington, West Virginia, wandering through music shops like “Pied Piper” and the music department of “Mac and Dave’s” department store as a kid, you might say that Jerry has lived and breathed guitar all of his life.
Now, as the string slinger behind “Learn Guitar Fast and Easy,” Jerry hopes that he can share with the world something that has been such an important part of his life. Playing guitar.
While getting a student to play should be something that’s a no brainer, any guitar teacher will tell you that it’s the hardest thing to do. Let’s face it! Guitar’s a hard instrument to play. While many methods entail at least a year of intense instruction before the student even reaches the point where she is introduced to scales, “Learn Guitar Fast and Easy” gets the student playing right away.
The first course, titled “The Bridge,” is a free series of videos and illustrations that Jerry refers to as “Blueprints.” The Bridge is intended to ease the student into the terminology that Jerry uses throughout the series. In these videos, the student is exposed to terms that may sound familiar but are used in a different context. While this is definitely unconventional, Jerry points out that it’s just a different way to look at it.
And he may have a point.
Good teachers are always looking to different ways to understand the guitar and get their point across. One man’s flat 5 is another man’s Tritone. They’re both the same damn thing, but the different labels convey another way of looking it. If you can think of them in both terms, then it becomes easier to apply them in different contexts. Jerry Wyatt gets this, and, instead of following convention, he uses his unique way of looking at the guitar to help his students better understand the instrument quickly.
In the first video, “The Simple 7 & 12 (Knowing Where to Go!),” Jerry goes through the importance of knowing the notes up and down the neck. Many of his students call his lessons “a serious eye-opener.” As the lessons continue, barre chords and pentatonic scales are brought in to bring everybody up to speed. Again, student responses say that Jerry’s unusual style just makes things click. Even for people who know their pentatonics, it’s worth watching Jerry’s lesson when he goes through ways of incorporating them into your playing without sounding like you’re playing through a bunch of scales. Something that he calls “Squashing the Scale Monster.”
Besides licks, Jerry goes through unique patterns and shapes – what he calls “GEO SHAPES” – that can be moved around the neck. He also shows you how to multiply the knowledge that you already have learned by twisting those shapes around and breaking them apart to give you a broader vocabulary of licks and riffs that you can use in different situations. Included are some backing tracks that put Jerry’s lessons into real-world situations and stir creativity in the mind of the student.
Most interviews usually begin awkwardly, but I was surprised when Jerry immediately started asking me about myself. “So I heard you’re a guitar teacher,” he noted right off the bat. His interest in others is what drives him to give out his personal number to all of his students. Students are encouraged to contact him directly if they have any questions, concerns, or comments about the course. As a private instructor, I do the same thing, but I only have fifty students to worry about. At last count, Jerry was pulling in over seven thousand.
“Learning Guitar Fast and Easy” is not your typical lesson program. Jerry infuses stories about his own life to enhance the course, which both emphasizes his passion for the instrument as well as showing how learning about guitar doesn’t end when you put the instrument back in its case.
Jerry told TheToneKing.com about spending his days jumping back and forth between Mac and Dave’s (a department store with a huge music department) and the Pied Piper (a local music shop). “Big Dan was an enormous guy with an enormous heart.” Big Dan worked at Mac and Dave’s and encouraged Jerry and his friends to play most of the guitars, but, of course, there were the top-shelf pieces that most people weren’t allowed to touch. One day, Jerry came in and saw Big Dan with a grin like the “rat who had eaten the cat.” After walking around Jerry saw what he was grinning about. In a glass display case, lying on a velvet bed, was a special edition Less Paul with gold hardware and a blonde quilted maple top. After drooling on the case, Jerry looked over at Big Dan. Big Dan, still smiling, simply said to Jerry, “Play it.” After Jerry had his fun and put the guitar away, a couple of weeks later he went to see Heart in concert. And when Heart opened with that iconic riff in “Barracuda,” Jerry was blown away to see that Roger Fisher was playing the very same blonde Les Paul that had been so carefully guarded by Big Dan.
It’s easy for us here at TTK to tell that it’s that type of excitement that Jerry brings to each lesson that keeps his students coming. His stories make him seem more ‘real’ than other guitar teachers, especially in the sometimes desolate world of the internet. “I want people to connect through these stories,” Jerry says in his warm southern twang. “Learn Guitar Fast and Easy” is not his only way of getting people playing either. Jerry is starting a program called GAK or “Guitars And Kids.” The goal of GAK is to put guitars into the hands of underprivileged kids. Through his passion for the instrument, Jerry Wyatt really does show that while you can “learn something from anybody,” it’s probably best to learn from someone who really has a story to tell.
You can check out Jerry’s course by clicking here. All TTK guests receive Jerry’s “Bridge” course for free.
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Filed Under: Featured • Interviews • Lessons
About the Author: Marc published his first novel Becoming in 2010. It’s a kick-ass book with monsters and dreams and stuff, and you should buy it. Since then, he’s written thousands of articles for TheToneKing.com, many of which have been picked up for circulation by manufacturers and other news outlets. His next book, Drugs and Pancakes, should be available early 2014 if his alcoholic editor can find time to work on it in-between destroying his liver and screaming about punctuation. He graduated from Roosevelt University with honors, which means that he’s not as dumb as he looks. He’s been playing guitar for over 25 years, which is almost twice as long as most of his students have been alive.