The introduction of beginners to guitar playing in Slovenia follows the established paths through the established literature, which has been among the Slovenian guitar profession since the very beginning of the systematization of guitar teaching, as well as through more recent guitar manuals. However, in this learning process, some beginner guitarists have difficulties in mastering the technical elements of guitar playing and in understanding the fundamental concepts of music theory, which hampers their progress and makes their education suffer if the above-mentioned problems are not addressed correctly or in time. We first introduce some of the objectives of the guitar curriculum and highlight the literature that is the most common resource for guitar educators and through which most beginners begin their introduction to guitar playing, and then we introduce the issues facing guitar educators and briefly present the most common forms of music notation, which do not use a notation system and, due to their simpler nature, are easier for beginner guitarists to read. We then present the principles and describe the concepts behind a set of introductory exercises that we have used to try to avoid the aforementioned problems for beginner guitarists in the qualitative part of our research into the introduction of innovations in guitar tuition. This is followed by a two-part empirical section, where in the first part we use quantitative research to justify the subsequent second qualitative part, where we also tested the effectiveness of the alternative authoring approach in the field. For the initial study, a questionnaire was designed to find out how widespread and how common these problems are among guitar beginners, according to their teachers (N = 63). For the qualitative part, we explained to two guitar teachers the progression of introducing beginners after the composite apprenticeship and interviewed them after the introductory period to inquire about the practical effectiveness of the presented alternative authoring approach in initial guitar learning. In the final part of the paper we summarize and evaluate the results
|