My 7 year old student playing TNC!

Hi! Just wanted to share a student I have jamming out to TNC after a year and a half of playing! I am amazed how fast he is learning... he will pass me soon for sure!

Kid is pretty amazing- certainly well played, he is going to be "the thing" when he is older if he keeps at it

I love watching youngters playing music. The kid is a star in the making and he don't even know yet.

Amazing.. I have been playing the same amount of time and can't even come close to playing like that!
Tell him to keep up the great work. I am very impressed~

Awesome! You both should be very proud!

C'mon! No fair! He has a Kamaka! lol

I hope I could be half as good after the amount of time he's been playing! Keep it up!

they just do not complicate things. They make mistakes and move on. Innocence is wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you all for taking the time to look! I'll definitely tell him he made an impression! The coolest thing about working with Seth is watching his confidence grow. He had no previous music experience and was very timid at first, now he is playing open mics, and tell his mom about talent shows (he won the local talent show at this years county fair!). Absolutely wonderful to see that change and it definitely gives me a lot of motivation to keep doing what I'm doing.
Happy Halloween everyone!

Good student and good teacher. Very impressive. It's amazing he is already that good and it's great that he is gaining confidence. Happy Halloween!

Wow he is great, and only seven years old. It must be very rewarding to have such a gifted student. Hope he keeps it up because you have a star in the making.

The two fingers anchored to the soundboard though.. that would be very difficult to un-learn I think? I'm no authority on this but I've always argued that if you learn to play without anchoring a finger then you'll never miss it, and you are more free in your selection of technique later. I have the impression that those who anchor have a hard time if they ever want to stop doing that.

-Tor

Tor said:

The two fingers anchored to the soundboard though.. that would be very difficult to un-learn I think? I'm no authority on this but I've always argued that if you learn to play without anchoring a finger then you'll never miss it, and you are more free in your selection of technique later. I have the impression that those who anchor have a hard time if they ever want to stop doing that.

-Tor

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We have songs where we use more than two fingers, but for this song as well as others that utilize a quick exchange of two fingers I actually push having an anchor as it gives your fingers as much support as possible keeping it in place. There are a ton of techniques that we use both anchoring and non-anchoring many times using both in the same song. I don't think it's an issue of learning to not use an anchor but more an issue of utilizing any of those techniques that fit the song or style.

So anchoring is bad? I have been doing this, but if it is a bad habit and my hand should be free, please let me know.

There are different opinions. I've formed my own opinion about it by talking with (mostly) guitarists about it - the common theme is that those who say they started playing by anchoring have big trouble unlearning it. One guy simply wanted to unlearn it because he wanted to play the guitar behind his back now and then, rock star style.. the anchoring got in the way and he couldn't fix it. If you learned to play without anchoring the hand it's easy to play behind the back or neck or whatever - at least not very difficult.

If you, on the other hand, learn to play with the hand free, then you can anchor later if you wish, without problems. But first you have to learn to play without anchoring. That's easy enough if you start that way, but gets more and more difficult the longer you have been playing with anchoring. So, if you learn without anchoring you can later play in many more ways (including anchoring).

The general rule: You must learn the rules, _then_ you can start breaking them. So my advice, for what it's worth, is to learn to play with the hand free, learn it good and proper so that it feels natural. Then, and only then, can you anchor now and then if that helps for particular things. However, if you learn to play with the hand free you'll also find that you won't really feel much need to anchor for just about anything. But you'll see Jake do it now and then (but only occasionally. I bet he didn't learn playing with anchoring from the start.)

-Tor