Mission Statement of The Shawn Lane Guitar Method by Sid Wolf
Mission Statement by Sid Wolf Why we believe this guitar/music method is more engaging and more effective than many traditional methods: 1. Our method is based in large part on concepts I learned from the late great Shawn Lane during the period I studied with him in 1996- 97 while I was teaching at the Atlanta Institute of Music (AIM), which is now the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media (AIMM). Shawn had superior musical abilities and an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects due to his sheer brain power, which was well beyond that of most people. As an example, he could write with both hands at once, letters with one and numbers with the other. It would all be legible even though he was looking at you and talking to you while doing it! As another example: when he was a young boy, age 12 or so, he would walk into the Memphis Library pushing a wheelbarrow. The Library staff members all knew him and knew he was a young budding genius, and they allowed him to check out as many books at a time as he wanted- no limit. So young Shawn might check out 25 books about, say, butterflies, and because of his natural speed reading ability and his laser sharp photographic memory, he would read them all in a week and become a virtual authority on butterflies. In this way, he became extremely knowledgeable about a great many subjects, including music. Shawn's self-taught approach to learning music was quite different than most familiar methods, borrowing approaches from some of the great classical pianists, violinists, and cellists (Shawn played the cello for several years starting at age 5), but the results he achieved are indisputable, as listening to him play will indicate. Fortunately there are videos of Shawn on YouTube that illustrate this point. I already had a somewhat positive reputation in the Atlanta area as a capable player and teacher but when I began studying with Shawn Lane I went through a period of feeling that everything I had learned about playing the guitar was wrong. It wasn't, but that is how radical many of his ideas seemed at the time.