The Middleway Materials Package

Middleway Brand Teaching Materials

Folders: Beautifully designed Middleway folders for student use. Perfect for organizing and transporting TAB books, Lesson Workbooks, Lesson Cards, and other handouts to and from weekly lessons.

TAB Books: Our very own custom Middleway TAB books with key method concepts & diagrams, and an easy to use, intuitive layout designed specifically for learning popular songs.

“Practice Makes Progress” Workbooks: Small, efficiently organized booklets for teachers to make weekly assignment notes at each lesson.

Lesson Block Cards: Small business cards that fit neatly into the Middleway folder for scheduling ease and consistency. These allow the teacher to date and clearly mark each lesson attended in a four-lesson block, and are replaced once the block has expired.

SAFE Basics: Until the Middleway Method series is ready for publication, these booklets will serves as a practical overview of the essentials of the SAFE Scale System.

Three-Ring Bound Teaching Materials

The Middleway PopChart Library: Four large songbooks containing almost 300 accurate, professional level chord charts & lyric sheets of famous popular songs in a large, easy to read format, from beginner to advanced levels.

Riff Reference Book: A huge collection of famous riffs for beginners and intermediate guitarists, TAB’d, edited, and organized according to progressive difficulty level.

Easy Chord Songs: A collection of famous popular songs arranged for open chords, and edited for maximum beginner accessibility.

Handout Masters: Neatly organized, quick access copies of tried and true Middleway lesson handouts for easy photocopying and distribution.

SAFE Diagrams: The most important SAFE Scale System handouts organized and ready for use in lessons, or as photocopied handouts.

Studio Decorations

Washington Post Photo, Framed: A full color, framed copy of our Washington Post article’s front page photo, including the newspaper logo.

Conductor Stand: One large Manhasset Conductor Stand emblazoned with the Middleway Logo. These stands have a small built-in shelf for pencils, pens, erasers, and picks, and come with two silver capos and two Snark tuners for student use.

Show Posters (by request): Reprints of previous Middleway Studio Concert Posters. These are seriously funky little works of musical art. Check them out HERE.

Method Posters (by request): Colorful posters depicting key components of the Middleway Method.

Software & Web Services

Free or discounted membership to the best online teaching resources and digital music programs available.

Spotify Premium (service): In addition to being an almost limitless online music library, and the perfect tool for working teachers, Spotify Premium will give you and your students access to to the Middleway Impovisation Index— a key and style specific collection of over 30 different playlists, created specifically with student improvisers in mind.

Songsterr (service): Songsterr is the web’s most accurate, extensive, and user friendly archive of guitar and bass tabs. Perfect for in-lesson reference, and for easily printed tab handouts.

Song Surgeon (program): This is an easy to use, extremely convenient program for manipulating mp3 files according to tempo, pitch, EQ etc. Absolutely perfect for tabbing difficult passages, decoding complex vocal arrangements, or any other transcribing tasks.

Logic (program): Logic is the preferred recording software for Studio Concert backing tracks. Over the years our teachers have created many multi-tracked arrangements of popular songs for our Studio Concerts, and these are now archived to help teachers create complex arrangements quickly, and to give students access to quality backing tracks for concert preparation. This archive can be easily shared and re-used by new teachers, as well as re-mixed and edited according to the specific needs of each Middleway studio.

YouTube Channel: All exercises for the Middleway Scale & Harmonic method will soon be catalogued in video format and available through our YouTube channel. Becoming a Middleway teacher instantly gives you and all of your students access to this invaluable, private online resource.

Reference Lists as Digital Files

Artist List: A massive list of well-known pop artists to jog you and your student’s memories when in search of new material (MUCH more useful than it sounds).

Stock Progressions Lists: These are lists of famous songs that use standard pop progressions (i.e. I-IV-V, or I-V-vi-IV etc), grouped according to progression type. This list is extremely useful when teaching the diatonic series, analyzing progressions, and for making general harmonic points that can be applied quickly and easily to other songs.

“Great” Examples List: These are lists of famous songs that use particular skills and/or techniques. They can be used both to help students decide on new repertoire to explore, and for teachers to hone in on specific skills for a particular student. The “Great” lists include famous examples of:

-       Fingerpicking songs

-       Flatpicking songs

-       Complex strum patterns

-       Bass lines

-       Lead guitar solos

-       Blues “feels”

-       Blues turnarounds

Improv Index: Lists of all the songs from the Spotify Improvisation Index playlists, grouped according to key and tone color for occasional reference.

Lyrics Library: Over 300 clear, well-organized, print ready WORD files of popular song lyrics (big font, neat spacing, clean margins etc). Perfect for mid-lesson reference or printed handouts.

Chord Chart Library: Scanned copies of all 300 chord sheets from the Middleway PopChart Library. These are also great for quickly printing handouts during or after lessons.

Handout masters: Scanned copies of all the main Middleway Lesson Handouts for easy reference, printing, and copying.

Shared Professional Contacts

You will also receive contact information for a host of music, video, and venue professionals who have worked with Middleway, know our model, and can more readily assist you in the production of your own Studio Concerts. These include:

-        Photographers

-        Videographers

-        Live Sound Engineers

-        Backing Musicians

-        Venues

-        Recording Studios/Engineers

Shared Concert Gear

Middleway owner Manny Bernardo has amassed a fairly large collection of live gear to be shared by all DC area Middleway teachers once they begin organizing their own Studio Concerts. His collection was designed to be shared with newer teachers, and to suit the needs of performing students. It includes:

-        3 all tube guitar amps (Fender & Vox)

-        3 professional level keyboards (Yamaha & Nord)

-        3 identical, professional level pedal boards w/ multiple, analog effects & tuners

-        4 additional Boss tuner pedals for acoustic guitars & bass

-        2 hand-built acoustic guitars w/ pickups

-        2 electric guitars (strat & tele)

-        Crate, 12 channel PA with plenty of microphones, cables and stands & speakers (for rehearsals)

-        Congas & percussion

-        Multiple guitar & music stands