By: Rick Landers
Brad Richter – Photo credit: Mark Corneliussen
Around 1999, world-class guitarist, Brad Richter, found himself discovering a small group of young men and women at Page High School, bordering the Navajo Nation in Arizona, who had taught themselves the art of classical guitar.
Essentially, a self-help ensemble who helped one another evolve and mature into solid players. He volunteered to help out the best he could, recognizing the dedication and commitment of the group reflected in their playing skills, as applied to classical guitar playing.
It didn’t take long for him to get more deeply involved, as he formed a bond with the students, their teachers, school counselors and their parents, turning an ad hoc group into a more formal network of young guitarists, now brought together under the umbrella of a Tucson, Arizona, non-profit called Lead Guitar (LG).
As many things in life develop, Richter’s and a critical array of cohorts’ plans developed incrementally, granularly, and step-by-step resulted into a network of guitar instruction projects to support the interests and talents of young musicians.
Using a dedicated Lead Guitar instructor and a train-the-trainer style program, LG couples a proficient classical guitarist with an on-site teacher, who learns guitar along with the select group of students.
The program also provides an Annual Teacher’s Workshop for the volunteer teachers to earn professional development credits, as well as private lessons. The concept has matured to include digital instructional videos, guitar method books, sheet music, and evaluation and assessment tools and resources to gauge student progress.
And even though young students gain inspiration from free videos on-line, Lead Guitar partners with a few celebrated guitarists at the LG sponsored schools, and seeks to provide access to on-campus matinees, performances, master classes and an end-of-year Lead Guitar Showcase Concert.
Classical guitar and crossover artists, such as Alex de Grassi, Iliana Matos, Leon Atkinson, Andrew York, the Beijing Guitar Duo (Meng Su and Yameng Wang), the Brad Richter – Carlos Bonell Duo, Helen Sanderson, and guitar pedagogue Matt Warnock, and many more world-class classical guitarists have supported the mission of Lead Guitar.
From its humble beginnings, Brad Richter and the staff of Lead Guitar have broadened the program exponentially, now having served over 25,000 students and have planted their support in 68 schools in five states. Lead Guitar seeks out locales with very limited access to the arts, that entails supporting both large urban areas and remote rural locations.
In 2019-20, Lead Guitar is serving more than 68 schools in five states. While Lead Guitar makes its home in Arizona, Brad and the LG crew have smartly and incrementally grown with more recent teaching activities in Los Angeles, California and in Denver, Colorado since August 2020.
Guitar International caught up with Brad Richter and discussed the origins of Lead Guitar, the development of young guitarists and their teachers and the ways and means of growing a non-profit business to programmatically and effectively sustain a dream.
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Rick Landers: Once you gained some ground on the idea of starting Lead Guitar, did you then seek out other locations where students were already self-taught, or use the original group as some kind of core group to set the stage as an example?
Brad Richter: We sort of did the opposite. We were only Page High School, with that group from the beginning. It had those five or six kids who were really great players already. But, it also had 20 beginners who couldn’t play at all.
And so, from the beginning, we had to find a way to meet the needs of both of those groups, simultaneously. Our curriculum has always had an aspect of, “How do we deal with two ability levels in one class?” And then, we figured, we’ll have learning groups within a class and each learning group is learning an ensemble part, that we then put together into a whole, where everyone plays together in an orchestra. So that’s a common thing. What happened with this energy we put into this one school, how could we practice with that result?
You know, it was a level of playing, a level of engagement at a school that’s never had guitar, or maybe even never had music at all. And so we kind of rode backwards to, “What’s the very first thing we need to learn?” How do we need to learn as a group? As opposed to learning as individual students in a private lesson? What do we do?”
So, each one of these levels kind of caused a re-investigation of the method and how we do what we do, and why we do it in what order. Over the years though, we’ve learned how to take a group of 35 kids who have never touched a guitar and get them playing at a competent classical guitar level in one year. Then we created material so that those kids who are new, can learn how to play and engage in the class. It’s held up, and you keep practicing for those kids.
Rick: Are these classes and during the day or become part of a regular curriculum? Or is this after-school study?
Brad Richter: During the day. That’s an important element, because before access and equity, that’s the time where we can reach everybody equally well. So, that helps us quite a bit. Also, it allows us to teach from a vegetables-before-candy perspective. We can learn some good technique and learn how to read music in standard notation because they’ve got to be there with us every day. And, get to the fun stuff that keeps them inspired once they have some chops under their fingers.
Rick: It almost sounds like you established something like what you’d see in a high school science lab. So you’ve got three or four kids working on an experiment together, and they’re at an advanced level, then maybe you’ve got three or four that are not at that level in various other levels. And so you’ve got these little pods of kids learning at their own speed, I suppose. Is that kind of what you did?
Brad Richter: Yeah. Every school is different too. The idea is there’s a teacher of record, like the original choir teacher at Page High School, and we’re co-teaching. That’s always there. So like our instructor will be there just to make the example easy, on a Monday for two hours, co-teaching the classes and introducing a new lesson plan. And then that teacher of record, who’s learning to play and teach guitar, just duplicates that lesson plan and runs rehearsal the rest of the week.
Rick: Alright, so did the schools buy guitars for the kids to lease or keep? How does that work?
Brad Richter: Well, we just have a classroom set of guitars and we’ve got partnerships with Córdoba and Yamaha, who give really steep discounts to the schools. Yes, the schools buy the guitars and some schools check them out to students. But mostly we find, especially in high schools and middle schools that meet five times a week, they get more practice in those school classes than most of my private students used to when I would teach privately.
Rick: Well, yeah. Because, it’s hard to do it on your own, you know there are so many distractions, right?
Brad Richter: Yeah. And in the focus, in that practice session with a teacher, sometimes it’s 35 students starting from scratch or sometimes it’s five really good students with 30 beginners, or sometimes it’s what you described, like six different pods of different levels. Then in Phoenix Union High School District, where we’ve got five programs and really great involvement, the district has committed to guitar at the high school level in all schools. They’ve got at least three, sometimes four levels of guitar for freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior, with that senior level being kind of a touring ensemble that goes out into the community and performs a lot.
Rick: I would assume that you’ve got some seniors that are new to guitar as well. Right? So it’s not like a step by step. If you’re a junior, then you’re at this level. Cause you may be a junior at an advanced level. You may be a senior at a very basic, novice level. So how do you set that up? I mean, they have to be in a certain grade level?
Brad Richter: No, it’s Guitar I, II, III, and IV, and for your first year, you take guitar one, whether you’re a freshman or a senior.
Rick: Okay. That makes sense. And so, when you first started out did you personally approach Yamaha and Córdoba, or did they hear about it? I mean, there are a lot of different guitar companies out there. Yamaha, I guess, is probably the largest musical instrument company out there. So how did you end up figuring out who you were going to go to or did some say no?
Brad Richter: Yeah, it was a really slow process as we grew. Probably around 2010, we saw the need to have a uniform way for our schools to get guitars. We started talking with Yamaha first and they already help schools get guitars, cheaply. So, we learned a bit from them about how to set up.
Both Córdoba and Yamaha, they worked through a local dealer. So for instance, when our schools ordered guitars, they’d contact West Music or Independent Music Center, then the guitars are shipped directly from the company to the school. It’s drop-shipped directly to them. And essentially the store is not taking a cut and just donating most of their time to make it happen. And they get, say a Yamaha C40 with a case.
Brad Richter: There are a lot of cases where we donate guitars to students, maybe between about 50 and a hundred a year. So when we have seniors that have been in the program for a long time and they’re graduating, we try to do that or kids who are just doing something special that they don’t have their own guitar. But, generally schools buy the guitars.
Rick: So, have you found it helpful to build some type of buddy system? I know we talked about the pod thing, but do kids kind of lock in almost organically with friends and so they have their own little pods as well, right? Outside the classroom…
Brad Richter: Yeah. That’s the coolest thing is seeing where their development leads. Yes, for sure. But we don’t really institute that. We talk a lot about building a culture of guitar on a school campus and it usually takes a couple of years. We’re going into schools thathave 80% or more of their kids eligible for Free and Reduced-Price Lunch. That’s what we look for, and then we offer a free program to that school.
There was a statistic recently that, in the United States, we spend $13,000 per capita on white children versus, $10,400 on children of color. So there is this disparity between schools that serve low-income communities, and what we spend, as a nation, on those schools per capita for education versus more affluent communities.
Lead Guitar aims to fill that gap where music, education, and sports and, and all of these other things live. So, the first thing that we find, even at the high school level, is Lead Guitar might be the first formal exposure to music education for some of the kids in our class. So we’re starting with, let’s play a simple song on the guitar, you know, what is pitch? And what is the difference between this pitch and this pitch, which one is higher and lower, and can we clap a rhythm and keep a beat? And so we start there.
Our first job is to teach music fundamentals through the guitar, and then we teach classical guitar fundamentals. At that point, we’re always encouraging kids to explore music, and we bring guest artists in from other genres and play ensemble music from other genres.Then, we start to see bands pop up at the school and, and kids teaching each other songs, that we have nothing to do with. And that’s when it really feels like it’s working; kids in hallways with guitars, doing something completely unrelated to what’s happening in class.
Rick: How have the teachers found that that’s impacted the culture in the school, so that maybe there’s less bullying or kids who may have been bullies are no longer bullies, you know? Are there any social aspects that you’ve identified or the teachers have identified as the social value of what you’ve done?
Brad Richter working with a group of young classical guitarists.
Brad Richter: Yeah, we spent some time last year trying to quantify some of those changes that we’re seeing anecdotally. We had an outside expert, do some data gathering and evaluations with teachers, and data-sharing with schools to see what impacts there were. So, some of the ones that jumped out where I was talking earlier about were our Phoenix Union High School programs.
Eighty percent of students that were in our program for two years or more, saw their GPA rise while they were with us in class. These were anywhere from a minuscule to a substantial rise, but some sort of rise in their GPA in those two years. In our Chicago classes, a cohort at Muchin College Prep had a cohort of students that were particularly at risk and they showed a rise in GPA across the board. But the dramatic things were their absences were cut in half, from one year to the next!
Rick: Interesting. Going back to the initial part of your response, and I understand the disparity between kids. When I went to school, like as an eighth grader, I went to an almost all black school and the books we had in school were used books from white schools. So, I don’t know if that’s still the case in various places, but I had assumed to some degree, that’s still out there, that type of thing,
Brad Richter: It’s totally out there. Yeah. It’s appalling sometimes, you know, and you just extrapolate that out to whatever the contemporary equivalent is, computers; either the lower income schools don’t have them, or they’re using the ones that have been booted out of the more affluent schools.
And, in a few schools there is also some sort of violence that breaks out, sometimes quite serious violence. We’ve seen homelessness and food instability, and these often cause massive turnover. In a particular school, our instructor really bent over backwards to try to make it work, and both the co-teacher and the principal quit, so the school was a little bit rudderless. Our instructor ended up teaching for a semester alongside a security guard, but it worked.
Rick: How about telling me if you have any favorite success stories, maybe a kid who was, who was basically in disarray or whatever and became focused and really found success in your program? More than one, if you have more than one.
Brad Richter: The first one that comes to mind is a student named Christian, who I’m still in touch with regularly. A lot of us are, I don’t think he would mind that we told his story, but he was in our program in Colorado, and was essentially failing all of his classes and was on a special education track, and thought to be illiterate in both Spanish and English, although it was clear, he came from a Spanish-speaking home.
The co-teacher in our guitar class discovered that he was actually profoundly hearing-impaired. The middle school in Colorado bought him hearing aids with school money. He was in guitar class already, and he turned onto the guitar like nothing you have ever seen.
He learned all the key songs, began writing his own songs, and was just the superstar of every concert we had for schools from his sixth grade year to his 12th grade year. He ended up going to Colorado Mountain College to major in music and graduated, maybe a little over a year ago. He’s a bright guy with a bright future, and so that was a big turnaround for him.
Rick: So, you’ve been doing this since 2000?
Brad Richter: Started in 2000. When I met the kids, it was 1999. The program really started that next year.
Rick: Is this a full-time thing for you?
Brad Richter: At first, it was a side thing I volunteered to do for awhile. In 2006, my friend Marc Sandroff learned about the program and helped make us a not-for-profit and turned us on to a board. And slowly since that time I’ve moved from doing this on the side to doing only this.
Rick:
Okay. Are you familiar with Robert Knight, the rock photographer who co-founded The Brotherhood of the Guitar for young players?
Brad Richter: No, I like the name though.
Rick: Yeah. And so he’s got, I know he’s got at least 50 kids that are from all over the world that are brilliant guitar players. And he’s also started the brotherhood of, of, I think the drum or drummers or something like that.
Some of the kids are absolutely stunning guitar players. To some degree The Brotherhood parallels what you’re doing, not quite the same, as he’s looking for young guitar players to mentor, around the world regardless of their affluence, or lack of affluence.
Brad Richter: You need to have it happening both ends, like broaden the access and then create a path to get all the way to the top.
Rick: So, during this time, I mean, if you started in 1999 and here we are 2020, what have you learned about yourself over this period of time and what have you gained?
Brad Richter: The time has kind of paralleled my time as a parent. My oldest son was born in 2003 and I think both of those things have helped me recognize my own unconscious biases, like my own privilege and selfishness in some ways, the limits of my own perspective.
And, each one of the things that I learned about parenting or about trying to make Lead Guitar better, and feels like it’s a moment where one’s not actually listening to what another person’s said. You know, I’ve heard that before, but I get it now. I’ve learned to be a better listener and learned to let my own internal monologue not always be dominant when I’m making a decision.
It’s a little bit like learning an instrument. It’s not something you perfect. It’s something that you have to be mindful about all the time, no matter how open-minded you think you are or how woke you think you are. We’re all pretty flawed seeing the world from our own perspective. And you have to kind of wake yourself up every day to say, wait a minute. Why are you thinking that? It makes me feel good when I’ve realized something that I wasn’t realizing before.
Rick: It may be a fundamental difference in how you view the world. Earlier we discussed sponsorships. Do they tend to come and go, or once you have a sponsor, do they tend to stick?
Brad Richter: So far they’ve tended to stick. And we really enjoyed seeing that as the pandemic’s hit and schools were in crisis, that some of those relationships became tighter. Like we did some really cool things with Guitar Salon International. Our original connection with them was they sponsored our programs in Los Angeles and they helped us get those off the ground.
We normally do a Showcase Concert that we’ve got in each of the cities where we operate. we have a university partner and performing on a college campus is also part of the program. Not only what’s happening in classes, but getting global touring artists to come to a school and play a concert for the whole school, and then getting students out of school, to the college campuses.
So, we couldn’t do the Showcase Concert this year, and instead the GSI Foundation helped us organize these virtual concerts, where we had really famous musicians jamming along with our kids and being interviewed by our kids and our students would play solos for them and get critiqued. So we had Zach Filkens from the band OneRepublic, and Sergio Vallín from the band, Maná, and Sergio Assad and Alex de Grassi. They all did the thing where they, did a grid online ensemble.
We arranged a song for each on of those artists for the students to perform a part in virtual ensemble. Cordoba gave away 50 guitars to the students at home, as it would in our program, just so they had an at home guitar where schools didn’t have enough. So GSIFoundation has helped out and so has the Diamond Family Foundation. They were some of our most important sponsors and have called us to say, “Is there anything you need now?” “How are things looking?” wanting to just make sure their investment is secure and being spent the way they intended it to be spent.
Brad Richter: Well, we switched as quickly as we could to distance-learning and we kind of did it on the fly in mid-spring by just recording, essentially Zoom meetings of ourselves with a score and teaching the guitar and annotating the scores we were teaching. We sent play-along videos and those kinds of resources.
But the problem in the Spring was that the stoppage was so sudden, that a lot of students were just disengaged. We’re ramping up into the same pandemic issue for the fall, and we’ve taken the opportunity to build a much more formal online platform for guitar, classroom guitar with our method, and to come up with some lesson plans and systems to take advantage of what we can do well with students at home online versus what we’ve learned doesn’t work as well.
Like trying to rehearse an ensemble online doesn’t work very well. So, we feel like we’ve got a system worked out that will help quite a bit, and we’ll engage those students who have Internet access and a guitar at home, but those are still the two biggest obstacles, Internet access, and then a guitar at home. So, we can help a little bit with the guitar at home and we’re giving away more guitars. The Internet access is often another economic issue. And, there again, that lower income students may not have access.
Or they’ve got shared access with other members of the family, I suppose, and trying to wrestle a laptop or whatever away from another family member who might need it more. So it’s tough.
Brad Richter, co-founder of Lead Guitar.
Rick: So, I know the Navajo Nation has suffered greatly under this pandemic, as far as the impact of the delay in federal funding, how did that affect your students? And I would assume that COVID-19 actually impacted the Navajo nation probably worse than other parts of the country.
Brad Richter: You know, we don’t know the impact any better than you do. We haven’t been able to visit the school and certainly not, you know, the digital interactions we’ve had, in the Spring, weren’t enough to really learn how that’s impacting students.
But, you know, just from having been there for many years and seeing, knowing what the conditions were before this happened, the students that are playing guitar, there are also students who will have lost family members and are living in places that don’t have electricity or running water and no phone. And there’s going to be a lot of desperation there and we won’t really see it. It might be Spring before we get to sit down with a student and hear their story and it’s also very hard to do over Zoom.
We’re using a teachable as a platform to kind of organize lessons and make everything accessible. But it just incorporates Zoom. So it has the same flaws.
Rick: Have you had to deal with parents who were initially skeptical of your program, but have turned around and become a booster?
Brad Richter: Absolutely. And, you were about to say this yourself with us, it’s kind of more teachers that are in that position. In fact, I often explain our program to somebody new that it’s a little bit like the Suzuki method, where in the Suzuki method, teaching private lessons say on the violin, the parents of the child is always in the room listening to what’s being taught, and they’re not expected to play the instrument well, but they’re expected to explain, to be able to reinforce the lesson during the week during practice and explain what needs to be done. And we kind of do a similar thing with the teacher of record in the classroom.
So, we don’t get all that much contact with parents, except at the end of the year, when they’re coming to a university campus for that showcase concert, we’ve got a lot of teachers who at first, you know, their principal made them do it.
They didn’t want to, but they came along with us. The one that comes to mind first, and she’s in Oklahoma. She was an accomplished band director and the school felt like…and this happens a lot, there just wasn’t enough enrollment in music in general, and the band program wasn’t attracting enough kids to justify the full-time job. We wanted to add guitar. She was really resentful about that at first.
And, when we began to work on using the curriculum, she kind of held me at arm’s length, but then got into it and saw how it was drawing in kids that weren’t coming to band and began to love it. So, that was it. I think she started in 2010 and she’s still in the program and is at every teacher’s workshop!
And she was the person who inspired us to create an adaptive curriculum. That was really her idea. She started using this, the Chord Buddy, which is this plastic device that got discovered on shark tank to help kids, with physical disabilities or learning disabilities, or any kind of disability to play more effectively. When we saw her doing that, we wrote a curriculum, so that we could combine kids who were maybe on the spectrum with a standard classroom and have everybody playing together, playing the same songs.
Brad Richter: We want to keep it expanding it beyond where we are now. We have to do that carefully and organically and not get out ahead of our skis on that. But, I feel like we have, and it’s not just me, we have our whole board of directors. We see potential to make this a truly nationwide organization and program, but we’ll see, we’ll keep kind of moving, you know, with one or two, regions at a time. And the digital platform we’re developing, I think will help us reach further and reach more remote schools. So, we anticipate to continue to grow at about the same rate, which has been about 20 to 25% a year in terms of number of schools and number of students served.
Rick: Well, that sounds pretty ambitious to me.
Brad Richter: Yeah, well, we’re in a sweet spot now and I would imagine that growth will slow down after four or five years, but it feels like people have gotten to know what we do and trust us. And, we’ve got a lot of great team members that are leaders in their own right. And can do these things certainly without me. So that helps, you know, that a lot of people doing that same work in their own community and, and pushing it independently.
Rick: Yeah. And I suppose that visions tend to be beyond your reach anyway. And then you always say I want to get here, knowing that you only may get, maybe get 50% or 70% of what your target is.
Brad Richter: Yeah. And that’s an annual event too, you know, we think we can do X and, um, well, we may often come up just a little short of what the goal was, but having the goal is what keeps it moving.
Rick: Yeah. You didn’t mention the term metrics, but do you do surveys of the kids as well to get feedback from them?
Brad Richter: Quite a bit. We weren’t able to do the follow-up survey this year because of the school closures, but we do, what we call a school attitude assessment. It’s a 20-question survey with a Likert scale of, you know, strongly agree to strongly disagree questions. We want students to take it at the beginning of the year. And then again, at the end of the year, how do you feel about school? Do you feel like you have skills that will make you a good college student or an employee, a good employee? Are you well liked, you know, like a long range of kind of self-evaluations, both about school and music and about, their attitude towards self, just to see if there’s any change that that guitar class might be helping with in that regard.
Rick: How do you get kids to think beyond whatever they think their limitations are, so that, so they’re not limiting themselves?
Brad Richter: Those certified teachers who are our partner, teachers are kind of the key to our success and the most important element of what we do.
Here’s a kid who needs some extra attention. Could we have some private lessons for them? It’s not so much about guitar, but giving that kid someone that they can vent with or feel special around, or get special attention from. So that’s one level where it happens, just getting to be another adult in the room that kid might reach out to and feel comfortable with that they didn’t before, for whatever reason.
And then, the effort to try to get our kids in circumstances where they might not have otherwise wound up. It gives them a glimpse into a different world. Like I keep mentioning the university showcase concerts. That’s a big one. And that’s kind of the key to it. We have kids playing on a world class stage, you know, in an auditorium with 500 seats and it’s their friends and family watching them.
We have like two hundred to three hundred kids playing an evening. So it’s quite crowded. And then we feed everybody. The idea is we want to get those kids and their families on the campus, but not just on the campus, but to make them feel celebrated and welcomed. And like, this is a place that’s theirs.
I think that can be a perspective changing thing. And then the opportunities connect in their own school with somebody like the European guitar quartet or Sergio Assad, or Andy York and Alex deGrasse, some of the artists that come and play in schools. I think they realize, that these people are famous and successful, but they’re here in my school today and paying attention to me. So, you know, “I’m worthy too.”
Rick: So, how about giving us the pitch you like to make to prospective sponsors?
Brad Richter: Well, two things that leap to mind are we’ve got that problem of not enough of our kids have instruments at home that they can keep, if you’ve got a nylon string guitar around your house. And especially if you live in one of our cities where we’re already operating Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, we could use it and give it to a student. That would bring a lot of joy to a student.
And then, your readers are probably tuned into this already, too, but I was mentioning earlier the disparity between, per capita spending on white versus non-white students in the United States. And we’ve all seen the newsreels about how this pandemic is of course, affecting black and Hispanic people, more than white people and low-income people, more than affluent people. Like it always turns out.
Now, today more than ever kids need arts education in school and all organizations and many like ours are out there. You know, even when schools are saying, “Hey, maybe there’s not room for the arts in this situation, we’re fighting to get it back in and trying to connect with students.”
And, and I think that’s a really worthy fight right now because, the fewer you have the darker, this pandemic seems and, and the harder it is to escape. So, I think your readers can help us help some kids have an escape, especially in the fall.
