How To Store And Organise Your Guitar Lesson Notes

I now send guitar lesson notes and attachments digitally to students. Directly after your online guitar lesson, you will receive an email containing notes of everything covered in the lesson, along with digital copies of any notation, chord diagrams, audio examples, etc., that are required to help your learning.

The covid pandemic forced me to teach online and send notes digitally. I soon found sending guitar lesson content digitally to be a far superior method to the hand-written notes and practice diary system I had used previously. I teach in schools face-to-face and even then, sending lesson notes digitally is so much more efficient.

The benefits of digitally sent guitar content are:

  • Diagrams are much clearer than hand-written guitar tab and chord diagrams.
  • Much more information can be presented.
  • I make sure that all diagrams are understood before being sent as they are used as teaching tools in the lesson.
  • It is easy to keep track of what has been learnt and when it was taught.
  • It is easy to search and recall content from previous guitar lessons.
  • Never again will the dreaded “I lost my practice diary” or “it got wet and destroyed” be a problem as anything can be resent.
  • Lesson notes are so much quicker to put together as I have an ever-growing library of guitar lesson content.
  • Lesson notes are available on many devices when stored on the cloud, so they are always accessible.

How To Store Your Guitar Lesson Notes

A useful tool is only useful if it is used correctly

For younger students, lesson notes are sent to parents. Although simply printing guitar lesson notes and giving them to a child might seem the logical approach, this goes back to having physical copies and negates many of the benefits listed above.

A more efficient method would be to copy and paste notes sent as text into a master practice document. This could be a Microsoft Word document, Apple Pages document, Google Docs, etc. It is a good idea to include the date at the top of any copied text.

When practising the guitar, there are many useful practice tools that can speed up the learning process. Practising to a metronome or playing along to a slowed-down track via the playback speed settings from clicking on the cog symbol of a YouTube video are two good examples of this. Both of these examples have a potential log of your progress – the metronome mark in beats per minute (bpm) on a metronome or the speed percentage on a YouTube video.

If you have stored your guitar lesson notes digitally, it is easy to see your progress by making a mark of the metronome speed. Every time you practise, you can start at this speed and when you are comfortable, gradually increase the tempo, adding your new maximum tempo to your digitally stored lesson notes.

Embrace The Cloud

If you store your lesson notes in a clearly named folder, along with chord diagrams, guitar tabs in pdf form, audio tracks, etc. (sub-folders for each category are also a good idea), it is best to store this folder on a cloud-based system.

A cloud-based system simply means that data is stored externally and can be accessed from any device. You may even already be using a cloud-based system without realising it.

Examples of cloud-based services are Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. I use all of these services and they make working digitally so much easier.

Digital Is So Much More Efficient

Hopefully, you can see why I choose to send guitar lesson notes to students digitally and how an organised approach to storing lesson content will help students progress much quicker than when using a hand-written practice diary.

I have written this article to help guitar students gain the most benefit from online guitar lessons. We live in exciting times and the ability to teach a guitar student anywhere in the world without leaving my studio is incredible.

I have worked hard to give my guitar students the best possible learning experience and teaching online has improved many aspects of learning. This is only possible if the student uses the resources efficiently.