Teaching Kids to Rock Out, One Homemade Guitar at a Time

I was never in band in school except for my senior year of high school where I took up the Baritone (Euphonium) in order to play electric bass in my school’s pep band. Things may have been different if I had someone like this teacher in my district.

Paul Rubenstein has been teaching kids music theory, in a way, and nurturing an interest in music in a somewhat unconventional manner. Working in New York, Paul brought his hands-on approach to getting kids interested in music to schools in Brooklyn and Queens this year. As an after school class, students build their own guitars under Mr. Rubenstein’s supervision. Previous classes involved making standard-scale electric guitars, but this year he’s done something different: adjustable fret guitars. His middle school class made six-string adjustable fret guitars while his grade-school classes made single string adjustable fret instruments. Paul explains his theory this way:

“The advantages of movable frets is that we can set the frets so that all the available notes are in the scale we want (no wrong notes) and we have access to all the notes… not only the ones in the standard 12 tone even-tempered scale of contemporary Western music. We took the opportunity to explore scales from non-Western cultures, and purely experimental scales, including ones the kids came up with themselves.”

At Paul’s website, he has audio, video, and pictures of his students and their creations. The below video is from the elementary school’s Urban Arts Festival.

If you’re interested in building your own music instruments with your kids, check out Make Magazine’s awesome cigar box guitar. It’s no replacement for Paul Rubenstein’s class, but if you don’t live in New York, it’ll just have to do.

Image: Paul Rubenstein

Wired also covered Paul’s classes in 2008, 2007, and 2006.