Bill Holton
I recently bought myself an acoustic guitar after a 35-year hiatus from playing. The long lapse was due to a variety of reasons. I didn’t have any close friends who played guitar to show me the way, and I couldn’t afford private lessons. Nearly all of the available books and other instructional materials weren’t accessible. If I wanted to learn a particular song, I had to buy the sheet music or songbook and have someone read me the chords. And guitar tablature, which is the standard method for notating guitar music using string and fret numbers instead of musical notes, was completely visual and thus inaccessible. I grew frustrated, and like many who take up an instrument, I gave up and “sold my axe.”
When the musical bug bit again and I decided to give the guitar another try, I was heartened to discover a growing number of more or less accessible resources to help me on my journey. I also learned that I am not the only baby boomer with the time and money on my hands to pick up the guitar for the first, or second, time. Many of —us are hoping to relive a little bit of the “glory days.” Others, especially the retired, are finding that playing the guitar is a relaxing and satisfying new hobby. I believe this holds especially true for us seniors with new, or long standing, vision issues.
From lathes and bandsaws for woodworking, to putters, drivers, and a club membership for golf, hobbies often involve a lot of gear and mobility. Learning a musical instrument, like learning to sew, crochet, cook, or garden, can be done mostly at home. For the musically minded, the guitar is a bit less costly and also easier to transport than some other instruments, like a piano,especially if you play an acoustic model that doesn’t require amps, pedals and other gear. If you want to take lessons, Skype, FaceTime and other real-time video applications have allowed many guitar teachers to offer remote learning, which is certainly a lot less cumbersome than trying to arrange transportation to and from the local Guitar Center for lessons. And if you’re a self-starter your first lessons may be as close as your smartphone, tablet, or Talking Book player.
Accessible Online Resources for Learning and Playing Music
The Library of Congress, Music Division
The National Library Service (NLS) includes an entire division dedicated to music education and appreciation. Most of their materials focus on musical notation and such, but the collection also features an impressive catalog of recorded instructional works for both piano and “strum and pick” instruments including guitar, banjo, bass, and ukulele.
Phone your regional library, or log into the BARD searchable catalog and you will discover a separate “guitar” category including nearly 700 downloadable titles appropriate for beginner to advanced players. NLS is still actively converting many of their old titles to the BARD digital format, but due to copyright restrictions many of their older music titles may never be available as digital downloads. One such title is Guitar Method for the Blind, by Donald Hoffer (DBM00697). Another is 24 Great Licks (DBM03380) from music instructor Bill Brown, who has several hundred other recordings available for BARD download.
Bill Brown
For this article I spoke with Bill Brown, whose materials are also available for purchase at GuitarByEar.com and PianoByEar.biz He told me how his own music teacher had refused to use musical notation, insisting students learned better when they learned to play by ear.
“When I began teaching music I did the same,” Brown says, “and instead of writing down homework assignments I would send students home with a cassette tape to work with.” Brown noticed his blind students especially enjoyed this way of learning, and when his wife suggested he explore this further he recorded Intro to the Guitar(DBM01719) and put a notice in the Matilda Ziegler magazine. “I began receiving orders from around the world,” recalls Brown. “And then the Library of Congress called. They ordered one copy, then called back to order another 25.”
Brown then produced Intro to the Piano (DBM01409) and with NLS support commenced work an ongoing series of other instructional recordings. Some of them, such as Guitar Theory 1, 2, and 3 (DBM 02233, DBM 02234, and DBM 02235, respectively) and Acoustic Delta Blues (DBM 02230) are theory or genre based. But Brown has also produced several hundred instructional recordings of individual songs, creating note-for-note, string-and-fret-by-string-and -fret, finger-by-finger guides to works running the gamut from traditional folk, spirituals, and blues, to classic hits from Garth Brooks, Nirvana, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Accessible Chords and Scales
Another useful resource for the vision impaired beginner guitar player is Accessible Chords and Scales for Guitar, Mandolin, Banjo and Ukulele. This website offers combo boxes to select the desired tone, A flat through G sharp,along with the mode, major, minor, 7th, minor 7th, etc.,you wish to play. As on the piano, most guitar chords can be played using multiple finger positions. Once you've indicated the chord you want to play, press “Submit” and you will be presented with a string-by-string, fret-by-fret description of each possible chord shape, including detailed instructions on which finger to use for each string. The site also offers the option to hear each chord, which worked well on my PC, but not on my iPhone.
You can also use the site to learn scales, and not just the major and minor scales, but all seven music modes, along with Arabian, minor bebop, and a number of other less common scales.
Accessible Written Music
When I originally tried to play guitar the only way to learn the chords of a song was to have a friend teach me or obtain the sheet music or guitar songbook that included the song. Today, all you need to do is go to the Web and perform a search for the song's name and "guitar chords." You can almost always find the music for any song, broken up with a series of chords followed by a line of the lyrics. Some of these include strum patterns, such as down, down, up, down, up. Be warned, however, that some of these chords sheets are more accurate than others. True, you are not going to learn how to play a song you have never heard this way, but I’m guessing you’ll be spending most of your playing time with familiar oldies, anyway
YouTube Guitar
These days, whenever the goal is to learn something new, a frequent first thought is, “I wonder if there’s a YouTube video about that?” For the guitar, the answer is yes, yes, a few hundred thousand times yes. Unfortunately, like most YouTube videos, the quality varies considerably and so does the accessibility. At worst, a video claiming to be a lesson in how to play a specific song will include a fretboard image that displays successive chord shapes as the music plays behind it. Occasionally, however, you will strike gold and stumble upon a personable expert who takes you step by step through a piece of music, noting every string and finger position along the way. Most lie somewhere in the middle. For example, I found a great video describing how to play "Greensleeves." The going was excellent until about three-quarters of the way through when the presenter did a bit of showing without telling. Luckily I was able to figure things out from what I’d already learned, but I will admit most times when this happens I do become rather frustrated.
“In my experience YouTube videos are best when used to learn chord construction, strumming, fingerpicking and other guitar fundamentals and techniques,” says Cameron Strife, a blind musician/composer/producer who has taught guitar in the Youth Music Program of the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School in Manhattan, which is part of Lighthouse International. “Others may lead you down the wrong path, playing chords and notes that are actually wrong. And there’s no feedback mechanism to tell you what you’re missing and how to improve your playing.”
That said, I personally have found a lot of useful materials on YouTube. A few of the best channels I have found include Justin Guitar and Marty Music. Some YouTube guitar instructors use the platform to advertise their free or paid course work or their remote lessons. Most of the initial freebees I sampled were pretty much inaccessible.
Accessible Smartphone Apps for Learning and Playing Music
Accessible Tuning App
All of Bill Brown’s books, indeed nearly all of the NLS guitar instruction titles, begin with a pluck of each individual guitar string to help the user tune their instrument. These days most players use electronic tuners, which attach to the guitar’s headstock and signal when a string is in tune. I've never found tuner accessible enough to use, but there is an app called Talking Tuner available from the iOS App Store for $.99 that speaks its status, such as “Note D is in tune,” or “Note G is 15 cents flat, (or sharp)” which means the string needs to be tightened or loosened respectively.
Accessible Metronome App
Guitar teachers usually encourage their students to practice using either a drum track or metronome. While there are any number of metronome apps to be had, either free or for a dollar or two, many are inaccessible. I settled on a free app called Pulse-Metronome & Tap Tempo, which has a simple interface with buttons to slow, speed, and start/stop the metronome. The buttons are unlabeled, but it was a simple matter to use VoiceOver’s double tap and hold “Label Buttons” feature to label the needed controls.
Of course the gold standard of guitar music is tablature, often shortened simply to tab. This is a listing of string and fret numbers that describes the music’s chords and notes exactly. Unfortunately, tablature is still mostly inaccessible. Many guitar instructors and players who compile tab do so using inaccessible PDFs. Others use Guitar Pro, which creates .GP files. These files are usually opened using various apps, such as Guitar Pro and Ultimate Guitar, where they display as inaccessible images. However there is an Android app called Lunar Tabs from Project Possibility that reformats these files to make them accessible to the blind. To use Lunar Tabs, follow these steps:
Locate a .GP file online and download it either to your Android device or to Google Drive. The Guitar Pro website is an excellent place to start. You can also use Google to search for the song's name and "GP3."
Launch the Lunar Tabs app and locate the “Load Tab File” button.
The app separates the song or piece of music into individual measures, and turns the tab instructions into text, which TalkBack can voice.
The app displays four directional navigation buttons. The Left and Right buttons move focus one note or chord at a time through the measure. The Up and Down buttons advance the display forward and backward to the next and previous measure.
The tab can be toggled between chord and string modes. At the beginning of "Hotel California," for example, the display shows “B minor chord, eighth note.” Toggling to String Mode switches the display to a description of which strings to hold at which fret numbers.
At any time you can instruct the app to sound the individual measure. You can also adjust the length of the measure of music that is displayed and played in increments from a single bar to the entire work.
Other features include a hands-free mode, which advances the tab display each time it senses a vibration, such as a foot stomp. It’s also possible to connect a MIDI device between your guitar and your Android device and have Lunar Tabs listen to you play and automatically advance to the next note.
The app is Android only, but if you’re an iPhone user this may be all the motivation you need to buy an inexpensive Android tablet. You may also want to use a hardware keyboard with the app, which will make tab navigation considerably easier.
Remote Music Instruction for People with Visual Impairments
If you're considering remote video lessons, here’s an excellent video describing one instructor’s process and method. Your lessons may be even easier to negotiate, since the video stream likely only needs to go one way. Google “guitar lessons via Skype or FaceTime” to get started, and be sure to ask if they have ever taught blind students, either remotely or in person.
Strife reports he has taught many blind students. He offers all of his course materials in accessible formats, and teaches both directly via Skype or FaceTime, or via back-and-forth recordings of lessons and assignments.
Beyond Music: More Accessible Hobbies
Perhaps you have no interest in strumming a guitar. If that’s the case, I hope you will still come away from this article with the sense that no matter what hobby piques your interest, there are likely accessible resources out there to support your interest.
Interested in fishing? Perhaps start out at the Blind Captain's Fishing page. The Blind Mice Mall offers a nice selection of braille cookbooks, and crocheting and knitting books and patterns. Miss hitting the slopes and think it’s no longer practical? Check out this YouTube video, or for a real thrill, this posting from the Blind Cook: Blind leap of faith: How the Blind skydive.
If card and board games are more your speed, you’re, shall we say, “still in the game.” Braille-marked playing cards can be found at Amazon.com and nearly every accessible products marketplace, as can magnetic chess and tactile checkers sets. Braille Scrabble and Braille and Low-Vision Monopoly are also available. You can even drive yourself crazy with a Rubik's Tactile Cube.
If you are interested in a braille version of a lesser known game, you may be able to find a kit to make it accessible using braille through 64 OZ games, which we have previously covered in AccessWorld Your favorite game not mentioned here? Simply do a web search for “braille” followed by the name of the game you wish to play. Or try (game name) plus “for the blind.”
Is it possible to resume your old hobby, or start a new one? You’ll never know unless you try.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
Related articles:
- AudioWizards from MyTrueSound: A Sound Investment for Blind Gamers by Jamie Pauls
- Recent Advancements Make Dungeons and Dragons More Accessible to People with Visual Impairments by Aaron Preece
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