Learning Guitar for Music Therapists and Educators

By Peter Joseph Zisa

This book on learning to play the guitar is written primarily for music therapists and educators, but is an excellent book for anyone wishing to learn to play. Dr. Peter Zisa, a concert guitarist and educator, illustrates the lessons with videos. Reviewers have enthusiastically recommended the learning progressions and the book was immediately adopted as a textbook for beginning guitar classes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Total Health Publications
• Release date: Sep 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386401858

Peter Joseph Zisa

Peter Joseph Zisa, EdD About the Author Dr. Peter Joseph Zisa is an award-winning concert guitarist, composer, writer, and educator. He holds a Doctorate in Education and a Masters in Music. A masterful classical performer, Zisa is adept in many styles of music - from blues, jazz, rock, folk, and to country, gospel, Latin, and flamenco. Zisa has been an educator for over thirty years working with K-12 as well as colleges and universities in both California and Oregon - teaching Guitar, Music History, Theory, Pedagogy and Psychology of Music, including twenty years of mentoring music therapy students at Marylhurst and Pacific Universities. Throughout his music career, Zisa has used music to help adults with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease to provide comfort to hospice patients and their families, and to conduct specialized music activities for children with autism and attention-deficit syndrome. Zisa understands the use of music as a clinical tool is not uniform among the varied population music therapists and educators serve. The teaching method this book presents is specific to the needs of music therapists and educators, and is the culmination of twenty years of tested methodology. Drawing upon his extensive experience as a musician and a teacher, Zisa offers a guitar teaching method that prepares the aspiring music therapists and educators to meet the requisite skills goals with as little as 45 minutes of practice a day.

Book preview

Parts of the Guitar

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Tuning Your Guitar

Sound (bombarding air molecules) travels in the form of a longitudinal waves. The wave length corresponds to individual periods of oscillation of air pressure. The frequency of these oscillations (sound waves) we experience as pitch. Each musical tone corresponds to a frequency of pitch which is measures in hertz, in honor of the Heinrich Hertz who discovered electromagnetic waves.

Until the early 19th century there was no universal standard of pitch. Tuning a consort of instruments consequently varied from region to region. In 1830s Johann Heinrich Scheibler, a silk manufacturer and self-taught musicologist, created a tonometer; a series of 56 tuning forks that measured pith. Scheibler recommended 440 vibrations per second (Hz) as the standard of pitch for the tone A. It was not until the 1930s that A 440Hz became the universal standard of pitch. See https://youtu.be/_wIho1S3pSU .

Tuning Guitar to the Piano

IF YOU HAVE A PIANO you may tune the six open strings of a guitar from the lowest to the highest pitch are E, A, D, G, B, and E to the piano. The first two open bass strings are below middle C (see below) on the piano. The fourth, third, second, and first open strings are above middle C (see below). The distance (interval) between the open strings, with the exception of the third and second string, is a perfect fourth (four notes): E (f, g) A, A (b, c) D, D (e, f) G, and B (c, d) E. The distance between third and second string is a third: G (a)