Guitar demo for the kiddies

Yesterday I did my now-annual ''guitar demo/guitar indoctrination" for my daughter's class. I'll probably keep doing it each year until she's out of gradeschool.

Basically, I"m trying to plant the seed of guitar-ness: if I manage to get a few of them to (when they're a little older) pick up the electric guitar, when they otherwise wouldn't have -- then, yeah: mission accomplished. (Bwah ha ha...) :)

Brought two guitar amps, a bass amp, an electric bass, two little kid-sized electric guitars, a regular-sized electric, and an old acoustic. Also a few effects pedals.

It was a bit awkward, since I was setting up in the school gym. I was told I'd have a half hour to set up -- which ended up not being true, as there as another class in there. Once they cleared out, the teacher's aide and I hauled my gear onto the stage -- and within about two minutes the kids come filing in. Wha???

**Totally** not ready: since I thought I had a half hour to prepare, none of the guitars were in tune, no 9V batteries in the effects pedals, etc. So, turned it into a "teaching moment" (no other choice, really) -- talked the kids through the process, as I was doing things. Ended up not tuning my guitar; also ended up not changing from my "regular" shirt into my "rock guy" shirt. Ah well.

I'd had a busy week, so I hadn't pre-tested a lot of my gear. Turns out that it would've been good if I had..

Since the bass amp only runs on American voltage, I brought a big ol' voltage converter. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the adapter that converts the Aussie output jack to the American pin configuration -- which meant I couldn't use the bass. But, as it turned out, when I tried plugging in the bass to the larger guitar amp, the bass had a bad output jack anyhow -- so, I didn't play it, couldn't demo it to the kids.

I showed them a wah-wah pedal, a "heavy metal" distortion pedal, a fuzz pedal, a delay pedal, and a flanger (stereo! routed the output to both guitar amps, then had them close their eyes an listen to the sound swirl around them).

Annoyingly, one of the two child-sized electric guitars also had a bad output jack -- so when I tried to set up the two "electric guitar" stations, only one of them had a working electric guitar (i.e., going into the amp). But, the kids seemed to enjoy playing the unplugged guitar, as well.

Also had an "acoustic guitar" station, and an (unplugged, unfortunately) electric bass station. Again, the kids seemed to enjoy it, even though it was "unplugged".

According to the teacher, the girls preferred the acoustic guitar, while the boys preferred the plugged-in (and distorted) electric guitar.


All in all, it went well enough. Some of the kids were really getting into it. And my wife said that the next day a lot of the parents said their kids had talked about it a lot that evening.

Next time, I might try an auto-wah, an octave pedal, or a tremelo pedal. Also, try to present a **working** electric bass: gotta get that fixed...


--GG