July 25, 2024
Steve Bello: Rock Beginner Basics
Photo credit: Michael Perry
The revered shredder and dedicated Music & Arts instructor shares his favorite tips and techniques for aspiring rockers.
A decade ago, Music & Arts guitar instructor Steve Bello toured Germany in a power trio led by the late T.M. Stevens.
Stevens, a slap-bass god whose original music picks up where Funkadelic left off, boasted a hall-of-famer’s résumé, including work with Steve Vai, the Pretenders, James Brown, Joe Cocker, Miles Davis, Tina Turner and John McLaughlin. Completing the trio was another master of grooving hard rock, drummer TC Tolliver. For Bello, the tour proved to be his all-time favorite musical experience, and one of the most educational.
To start, he learned to adapt to improvised set changes, as Stevens would call new, unrehearsed tunes off the cuff—James Brown, Prince and more. Bello, by then a veteran professional musician with countless gigs under his belt, also got a crash course in stage presence. “The most valuable piece of information T.M. ever gave me,” he said recently, “was ‘People pay money to see the whites of your eyes, not the top of your head. Give ’em a show!’”
“He was right,” Bello added. “Give people something to look at—and not just your fingers.”
At first, Bello wasn’t sold. After all, he built his career as a serious and accomplished rock and metal musician, with a discography of instrumental albums showcasing his melodic composing and virtuosic seven-string technique. His band has warmed up crowds for hard-rock royalty including King’s X, Lita Ford and vocalist Joe Lynn Turner. He’s given clinics as an official Ibanez endorser, and has a continuing relationship with Orange Amps and other brands. Wasn’t great playing enough?
But on that German tour, Bello started smiling more at the crowds who came to see him, engaging the audiences with his body language, and basically just having more fun.
Fun is important to Steve Bello—essential, even. In his lessons at two Music & Arts stores in New Jersey, South Paramus and Ramsey, enjoyment is the guiding principle. “My philosophy with teaching is, if you’re not having fun, I’m not doing my job right,” he explained. “I tell all my students, ‘When you walk through that front door of the store, I want to see you excited to walk in and twice as excited when you leave.’ You have to be happy learning the guitar, whether it’s a hobby or you’re playing Carnegie Hall.”
“Give people something to look at—and not just your fingers.”
We asked Bello to share some of the strategies and ideas he’s picked up over the past 28 years he’s worked as a guitar instructor—including seven at Music & Arts, where he also teaches bass guitar. Although Bello is a classically influenced player who studied jazz, he remains above all a dedicated rocker. Much of his method focuses on helping students learn their favorite songs, in the process breaking those tunes down into manageable concepts. In this conversation, he focused on his insights for beginning students, especially children and adolescents.
The Pep Talk
When Bello takes on a new student, he begins with a simple but meaningful question: “What made you want to learn guitar?” It’s a query that allows him to understand their tastes while kicking off a warm, comfortable rapport, and he’s looking for nothing except an honest answer. Many students will say, “Because it looks cool.” Fair enough. Increasingly, he’s noticed young women wanting to learn after being inspired by Taylor Swift or the pop-jazz artist Laufey. And he hears plenty of cross-generational rock favorites mentioned, among them AC/DC, Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses.
After a friendly vibe is established, Bello levels with his students: “I always tell them, ‘Learning the guitar is tough. I’m not going to sugarcoat anything. You’ve got to put the effort into it. But if you do, trust me, you’ll learn your first song in a month or two.’”
Learning to fret the instrument can bring a bit of physical pain. Bello has an analogy he returns to, to remind students how repetition can curb that mild discomfort: “When students are pressing their fingers down, learning their first few notes, I often hear, ‘Wow, man, that hurts.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, do you play sports? Do you remember the first time you felt a baseball hit the bat? Didn’t your arms shake?’”
The “Eleanor Rigby” Trick
Often it doesn’t take even one month for his students to begin strumming through a song. After introducing students to the natural notes on the fretboard, Bello goes over some of the most-used open-position chords. “And then I’ll trick them,” Bello said. “I’ll say, ‘Put these two chords together: C and E-minor, E-minor and C.’ And they say, ‘Wait, that sounds familiar.’ I say, ‘You’re playing “Eleanor Rigby,” by the Beatles.’ And then the student will say, ‘If I could do that, show me something else!’”
Essential Starter Tunes
Bello has a bunch of perfect beginner tunes for young rockers at the ready, and they tend to be based on streamlined chordal riffs. These songs also tend to have enough time between the chord changes that a beginning student will be able to comfortably navigate them on the fretboard; of course, they’re digested even more effectively when they’re slowed down for practice.
This list includes tunes like Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and various Green Day hits.
“Often, the student goes, ‘I’ve got this,’ and they’ll want to move onto other terrain,” said Bello. “I’ll have a student come to me and say, ‘Yeah, my dad played me this Rush song on the radio, and I want to learn it.’
“‘Hey, eat your Wheaties,’” Bello laughed. “‘You want to be challenged? Let’s go.’”
Rhythm Training
When it comes to building a solid sense of rhythm or “time feel,” Bello points to Australia’s loudest export. “I always say, ‘Listen to AC/DC, because the drummer never plays a fill,’” Bello explained. “That’s the quarter note; that’s the one, two, three, four.”
He also recommends hip-hop for rhythm-focused listening. “Rap is very popular, and rap is all about the beat,” said Bello. “If you listen to rap or AC/DC as a starting point, you’ll get timing, you’ll get what it means to pace yourself, you’ll get what it means to find a groove.” Bridging the rock-rap gap, Bello also uses the Aerosmith/Run-DMC hit “Walk This Way” for groove studies, as well as Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.” Black Sabbath, featuring jazz-loving drummer Bill Ward, is another helpful source of rhythm lessons. “I tell guitar players, ‘Listen to drummers, not just guitar players.’”
Rock History 101
If you haven’t gleaned this fact yet, Bello is an affable, adaptable, student-first instructor. But one thing he insists on is rock history. His students are going to understand where the music came from, whether that means a mini-lecture on Led Zeppelin’s blues roots or a recap of the 1971 Montreux Casino fire chronicled in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.”
Bello explained how his students better appreciate the definitive traits of the guitar gods they’re studying by exploring those players’ influences: the Police’s Andy Summers leads to a discussion of jazz and reggae; Ritchie Blackmore, who rose to fame in Deep Purple, is an occasion for a classical lesson. “Where did they get their stuff from?” Bello said. “They weren’t born in a vacuum.”
At the same time, Bello is open to the new and divergent ways that his students are discovering the rock songs they love. “I rarely hear, ‘Oh, I found this on the radio,’” he said. His Metallica requests are being sourced from Stranger Things. Yes’ “Roundabout” is heard in a viral meme. After the Queen biopic was released, he saw a surge in Queen-focused instruction. “If a student says, ‘I want to learn this song because of TikTok, because of Instagram,’ OK, I’m not going to argue,” Bello said. “Let’s do it.”
To Tab or Not to Tab
Bello is a self-described “music theory geek” who was impacted early on by his grandfather, a jazz musician. He often uses the chords he’s teaching in popular rock tunes as the launch pad for lessons in the major and minor scales and other theory topics.
A college-educated musician who can easily read and write music in standard notation, Bello nevertheless opts to teach beginners using guitar tablature. “I don’t force [standard notation] on my students because I think it scares them,” he said, adding that reading music can undermine the atmosphere of fun he’s trying to create with his lessons. He’ll use tablature until the student expresses interest in reading standard notation, until they need to read for their school’s jazz or pep band, or if he has an especially theory-savvy young player who is clearly ready to take that next step.
No matter the format, when he’s transcribing for his students, he makes a point of including annotations that will brighten their practice sessions. “If a kid comes to me and asks, ‘How’s Angus Young of AC/DC doing this?,’ I’ll write it out and put little funny notes like Bob your head up and down or Make sure you wear shorts and a tie.
“Put yourself into it,” Bello continued. “Just be the music. As corny as that might sound, that’s how I teach.”
Guitar/Life Balance
Bello’s guidance on practice is essentially do as I say, not as I do. “Apply yourself, but have a life,” he said. “It’s summer: go swimming, go to the movies, play basketball. Don’t be like me and sit in your basement all year playing guitar.” That said, he does require a consistent practice routine; in fact, a student who simply does not practice is the only instance when Bello will feel like lessons aren’t fulfilling, for student and teacher alike. In those situations with Gen-Z students, Bello will ask, “How many hours per day are you on TikTok? Take 15 minutes of that and go over that riff. You’ll be surprised.”
“Apply yourself, but have a life…”
Beginners should make time for a half-hour practice session every other day. “Just show me the initiative and we’ll get along fine,” he said.
As for Bello, he puts in as much effort as an instructor possibly can—and he loves every minute of it. “Nothing excites me more than seeing my students amped up,” he said, “when they can’t wait to learn something or they can’t wait to show me what they heard.
“I learned this from a bassist friend out in L.A. Her name is Farida Nelson,” he continued. “She said, ‘Teaching is exhausting in a great way, because you’re giving a piece of your soul to every student.’ But it’s a good tired.”
