Help me give my students a Chord Buddy device for all of our guitars (plus a couple of extras just in case) so we can play D, G, Em and C chords quickly and easily.
My classroom is performance oriented with a stage, a full set of risers, and more instruments than you would expect in the average elementary classroom. We make music with our own hands and breath, and we do it well. I'm in my seventh year at this school, and in the time I've been here, my students have become multi-instrumentalists on the bass, mandolin, piano, and drums. Some students like to switch around between the instruments, while others have "specialized" and concentrate all their learning on just one. Either way is fine by me, as long as they're learning and enjoying music and school.
My Project
My students really love making music and are versatile on several instruments like basses, mandolins, drums, and mallet instruments. While we have 15 guitars available, playing them with any degree of difficulty outside of an Em chord has challenges.
Guitar chords (except for Em) require the use of 3 or 4 fingers, and in just 40 minutes once a week, while also learning other instruments, time does not allow my students to be proficient in making the chord shapes necessary to play a song.
The Chord Buddy is a device that clips onto the guitar neck to make chord playing easy. When kids are not accustomed to forming chord shapes, their fingers can look like squids in distress. The Chord Buddy starts them on this journey by allowing them to use only ONE finger at the beginning. It has four colored buttons that when pressed, push rubber stoppers onto the strings as your fingers would in making chord shapes. Pressing blue gets a G, green gets the C, red is a D and the yellow is an Em chord. There are at least a million songs you can play with a combination of these chords. It comes with a color coded song book. While I am not a fan of shortcuts in music, this device will help students get started quickly. I have already purchased one of these devices to make sure it works and is not a pile of junk before I ask donors to fund 17 of them. The kids love it and are having success with it. I look forward to having one for each guitar along with a supplement song book for lots of musical choices.
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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