Originally Posted by: Slipin Lizard
Getting back to books... lets leave Hendrix out of it for a moment, and instead, lets say I go to your teacher and tell him I want to learn about modes. Now, I can just go to one guy, sit down for a half-hour or 45 min once a week, paying, what, $25, $30, or even $40 per lesson as he tries to teach me about modes. If there's something he thinks of that's an important point, he'll likely want to write it down, and may well do it during the lesson (of the half-dozen instructors I've gone to, EVERY one of them would write stuff out during the lesson). If I go home and forget something he mentioned, if I look at the paper and what he wrote out and don't understand it, I'll have to wait until the next lesson to go over it with him.

You brought up a point that I forgot that really frustrated me with private lessons - he didn't write everything down and it was more than likely that I would forget something we went over just by the time I drove home. It drove me NUTS. Or, I'd look at the tab and not be able to correlate it to what it should sound like since I had no audio to go along with it - TAB is great, but rhythm isn't part of the notation. Today I would probably bring my Tascam portable audio recorder to my lesson... One time he wrote down the tab of a solo he made up on the stop which made no sense to me whatsoever with no context once I got home. That's when I started wondering if this was really the right situation for me.

Everybody learns differently...some people are OK with the free-form-let's-see-where-this-goes attitude of some guitar teachers. Other's such as myself want a roadmap (curriculum) to say "here is where you are, here is where you want to go, and here is how we will get you there".

Just more stuff to think about and consider...like you needed more :-).