Participants at the summer guitar workshop at Satya Bharti. Picture by Hardeep Singh

Ranchi, June 13: There is more to playing the guitar than strumming a few songs.

The summer guitar camp at Satya Bharti aims get behind the glamour of the guitar and teach the participants how to play the instrument properly. The camp started on May 29 and gives one-week training to aspiring guitarists. The third batch is currently taking lessons.

City guitarist Anand Purti is the man behind the workshop. ?Everyone seems to want to play songs instead learning how to play the guitar properly,? he says of the craze among the youth. His workshop aims to rectify this. ?We?re trying to give our participants an overall picture so they don?t get confused with the different styles such as jazz, rock, pop and blues.?

Purti?s personal interest is finding the origin of different styles and how they are inter-related.

Apart from guitar lessons, he makes the students listen to pop compositions and even the classical guitar. He has designed books and CDs, with notation and theory, apart from some compositions, along with fellow guitarist, Ajit Horo.

But is one week too short? Purti feels so. ?It?s a bit difficult to cover so many theories and styles in a week, both for myself and for the students,? he confesses.

The short nature of the course means that some parts such as the theory and the jazz ?it?s too huge a subject? will be curtailed. Students are provided with a chord dictionary so that they understand how a chord progression is made.

Purti feels that understanding the theory is more important than playing the song. ?There?s no point in playing if you don?t know the basics,? he says.

Ujwal, a member of a city rock band, is helping Purti with the camp. Purti also plans to bring in a guitarist from Calcutta next year.