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[Walda Caesar]

Most bo beginners seem to overlook their stances. I get it, you think bo is all about the hands and upper body. But the stances actually create the foundation for everything your upper body is doing. A better long front stance means a more powerful thrust. A nicer cat stance means a more balanced, yet graceful uppercut. Here are the stances:

I found part of a branch of a tree in my yard a couple of weeks ago. I pretty much instantly deemed it my new staff. Actually I have never owned a bo, but used to spin pool cues in bars when I was younger. Basically some sloppy, improvised spins lacking any real direction or purpose. I have watched a few of your clips on the net, and I do appreciate your presentation, and have already learned some stuff. Hopefully I will keep up with my latest interest and do the bo some justice. Thanks for taking the time to post your instruction .

Thank you so much, this means a lot to hear. You can absolutely learn through home study with the right focus, discipline, and intent. Have fun training and learning along with us, have a blessed day as well! -Sensei Michael

It does make it easier to learn the staff, with prior traditional martial arts experience. However, it is not required. This is why I have an expanded, step-by-step section in my beginner level of the Ultimate Bo Course (the yellow chevron level). I will actually teach you the stances you need to know in order to master the staff; we learn the front stance, long front stance, horse stance, attention stance, and fighting stance. I have a student who just earned his red chevron a few days ago, who is a professor at a college, and complete beginner to martial arts. He walked in, not having any previous training with stances or other arts, and he looks outstanding.

So, prior training in a traditional art like karate will reduce the learning curve, but you can still learn the staff without it. Make sure and spend time on stances, though, at some point in your beginner training. Many novices skip over them, just because they want to do the upper body work, and end up missing the boat.

Hello Sensei Hodge.
I want to learn the bo, because I think its a pretty awesome thing to know, but I also want to be able to take those skills that I learn and help other students at the local Taekwondo dojo that I teach at, that might be considering learning the bo as well. Would you recommend going the DVDs, or going full on with classes and such?
Thanks

Hi Zach,
The bo is awesome, and would go well with your TKD training! If you are very interested (in actually earning rank and getting feedback from me as you go forward), definitely go for the GMAU Ultimate Bo student membership. If you are just learning for your own interest and training, the DVD set will be just fine. Either way, go for it, and have fun mastering the bo!

I have been practicing with the bo staff for several years, using the Jackson Rudolph FLOW system and purchased your curriculum to refine tradition striking and combat practices. Is there a way to log hours previously gained? I want to join the student / Instructor course so that I can offer my students the ability to gain credible ranks for staff. I want to proceed correctly but wonder if my past experience has any merit with where I can start?

Great to meet you and to have you with us. To be an officially recognized student that can earn rank (and eventually be an instructor), you will need to enroll into the GMAU Ultimate Bo student membership: . Yes, once you enroll, you can log the previous hours that you have trained, which will be attributed to your yellow chevron journal. You will be able to take you test sooner because of this previous training. Looking forward to it!

I do have a heavier steel staff. It is good for strength training. I prefer a nice hardwood oak for most training circumstances, but a metal staff can also do. Just be careful if you get a heavier staff, some techniques can be dangerous on your wrists.

Without a goal, you are destined for failure, or even worse, mediocrity. Are you training to compete at a tournament? Are you training to teach your martial arts students the bo? Are you training just for fun, as a hobby? Write down what you want to achieve.For example: I will earn my yellow chevron in Ultimate Bo by next month. (Ultimate Bo is my full white to black belt program where you can earn rank in Bo).

My son has been bo staff trainingfor about 7 years now and has won several state championships and NASKA titles. I really like your advice on learning basic techniques first before working on combos or full forms. Good stuff!

I remember learning EGBDF-FACE etc and then laboring over it for each note. I don't remember how and when I stopped laboring and sequentially counting. It was probably when I started hearing more music way beyond my pianistic abilities eg Beethoven sonatas, and following with score. But I don't exactly remember...

The approach teaches three "landmark" notes (Bass F, Middle C, Treble G), associating the staff position with the piano key such that the note name is unnecessary (except for ease of verbal communication).

I would just add one note if caution: fluency is the ability to utilize an idea easily enough that it doesn't cognitively interfere with other, more complex ideas. In music, this is fairly easy to see. Learners who are not fluent with intervals do not easily master chords. Students who are not fluent in chord identification and construction have difficulty with simple tonal analysis, and so on and so forth.

So my word of caution is, while I appreciate the idea of making the note-reading easier at the start, do not entirely eschew the difficult (and rather rote) aspects of simply naming notes. Without serious note fluency, later skills remain locked up and out of reach.

I often have my piano students literally name notes, bottom to top, left to right. It's boring, it's rote, but it is also effective. They get much faster at it, and this fluency unlocks higher level understandings as soon as the note reading itself begins to get out of the way.

When reading the intervals from staff there are some short cuts you can develop like fifths and thirds move from line to line or space to space and fourths, sixths, and octaves alternate lines to spaces, spaces to lines.

On the motor skill side of things you should learn basic fingering positions and patterns in terms of intervals. Five finger position, scales, full octave chords, playing double notes in one hand, repeated notes, playing scales in broken intervals, etc. provide the techniques for movement around the keyboard, but they also should be understood as intervallic movements. Depending on the requirements of a particular passage you can select from that bag of technical motor skills to execute the interval changes.

...where (5)4 is meant to show a silent finger change to shift the five-finger position up. So, 1 is on C and in five-finger position going up a fifth would just hit 5, but we don't play 5 and instead replace it with 4 to shift position up, then the descending third is executed by simply putting down 5 adjacent to 4 and next hitting 3 both in normal five-finger position.

We need to start with finding C, but after that we don't need to know anything about pitch letters to sight read the notation. We only need to know how to play fingering patterns in C major with awareness of intervals.

Of course the particular details of a passage might require playing a particular interval, ex. a perfect fifth, in various ways. You could play this little passage using the fingering for octave chords. Here would be the basic fingering material and application of the two options...

I think this is how motor skill technique gets linked with reading notation for performance (sight reading.) The language to describe it is then not pitch letters but interval changes, and much more conveniently various relative motion types: broken chord/arpeggiation, conjunct/scalar motion, parallel thirds, etc.

If the purpose is to read staff for pitch letters, identifying chord, etc. then the proper thing to do is learn how staves are aligned to staff and then learn to recite pitch letters by thirds and fifth, ascending and descending.

It's probably hard for some people to get past FACE and EGBDF, because it's taught to so many at so young an age, but the various common clefs - G, F, and C are aligned by the "swirl", "double dot", and "little c" on to line so those lines are identified respectively as G, F, and C. From those reference points you can move up/down by thirds or fifths (an extensions by single steps) to identify the rest of the lines and spaces. ACEGBDFAFDBGECA and AEBFCGDADGCFBEA should be automatic patterns.

I wouldn't obsess on letter-names, but I equally wouldn't obsess on AVOIDING letter-names!I don't think anyone's ever had a problem in recognising Middle C, either on the staff or on the keyboard (though with today's instruments we may have lost the 'just over the keyhole' landmark :-) Step up from C, step down. Jump by a 3rd etc. Mention the letter-names, but don't make them the main identity, focus more on position on the stave, under the hand, on the keyboard. And it's never too early to start on aural skills. Sing the note before playing it. (Did you get it right?)This may sound a bit disorganised. But it works. (And don't forget to point out that you can spell, sing and play CABBAGE etc. That's fun too.)

To be honest, I've rarely encountered a talented beginner who required any special pedagogical approach to notation. You just show them how it all works then start playing stuff. And the un-talented ones are going to give up anyway.

The most effective way to learn staff notation is in conjunction with learning to play, just as the best way to learn a written alphabet is in conjunction with learning to speak and write, and the best way to learn a language is while learning to speak it.

And like learning written language, the best way is to scaffold the learning. A child's first reader starts with "Cat, mat, hat," etc., a small number of vowels and consonants. Similarly, there's no need to tackle the entire grand staff, or even all five lines of a stave. Instead, start by playing (not just looking at) songs that use just a few pitches. This can be frustrating especially for adult learners, whose ability to cognitively connect the dots can jump ahead of their "fluency." "Okay, okay, I get it; every pitch is on a line or space, okay, I can count up or down from C to anything, now let me play Chopin." But instead they need to play not just one but dozens of pieces spanning no more than a tetrachord, so that they complete a chain from eye to brain to hand to ear to brain that can skip the conscious analysis, just as at some point we stop saying "C-A-T spells cat," and start recognizing the entire word at a glance. Play a dozen pieces using C, D, and E, and we eventually stop counting lines and recognize the actual graphic shapes as those pitches.

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