About the Author

I am Taura Eruera and I live in Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand. Apart from a decade off in the 90's I have taught guitar continuously since 1982. That experience included teaching harmony, rhythm and guitar at the School of Creative Musicianship for six years followed by private teaching, seminars and clinics. Over the years I have written many titles for guitar, melody, harmony and rhythm instruction. My titles have been self published for in-house and private student consumption or for publication on self owned websites. Over this time my energy has been focused more on creation than distribution. Now with platforms like Amazon Kindle available, I am formatting my catalogue of work for wider distribution. Much of my writing has come out of my studies with Dick Grove, Howard Roberts and, more importantly, directly out of my teaching experience. I am grateful to a crazy diamond of a guitar player named Clash for being my pioneer rhythmisation Dobodobo guitar student, way back in the day. Clash reckoned that his skill in verbalising the Dobodobo's enabled him to put his strumming and picking hand on auto pilot. And make life that much easier for him at the Guitar Institute of Technology. Guitar teaching has been a major activity for me over the years. Teaching has always alternated with gigging and other activities in my work life: old school session work before the computer; transcription and lead sheet preparation and digital session work after computers came in. Then these activities extended to business consultation, business startups, founding roles in radio and health care companies, software development and search engine optimization services. Outside of guitar, my biggest teaching interest has been in the area of rhythm and rhythmisation. As a young teacher, I taught how I was taught: I taught harmony, first, second and third. It took me several years of teaching to understand that the main reason my students were not progressing as they should was because they were not learning, and being taught, rhythm. Teachers had the language to teach harmony but not rhythm. These days, for students ten and over, I teach rhythm first before I teach melody or scales. I teach them rhythm through rhythmisation and verbalisation. For these students I add notes to the rhythm rather than rhythm to the notes. It's amazing how much better students play notes or chords when they can place them on top of or inside a rhythm.