Hi Renato. I really appreciate the message. I'm having a crisis of faith in Tomo's style of teaching, so your post comes at a good time.
Compared to the well-established and orderly CAGED system, Tomo's lessons seem disordered. I'm putting in lots of practice time hoping that a bigger picture will emerge, but since I'm an older student, I'm anxious about devoting a wasteful amount of energy to long-term projects when there are more efficient roadmaps. It's a true (and sometimes discouraging) fact that I have less time than I used to have when I was a young man.
I'd like to summarize my understanding of Tomo's system. There seems to be no single source that explains his strategy.
First Tomo discourages visualization and related shape recognition. That means dispensing with "positions" on the neck, CAGED boxes, and scale patterns. In one video, he commented that "smarter people have a harder time, because they want to visualize everything."
Taking this one step further, Tomo would prefer that students try not to even look at the fretboard. In his DVD "Accelerate Your Guitar Playing," he writes: "Don't look at the neck when playing. So many people are stuck playing the same patterns, box shapes, and fretting-by-the-numbers. If you want more freedom and expression in your playing, let your ears lead you instead of your eyes."
Second: He wants students to spend a MUCH-longer-than-usual amount of time internalizing note combinations and scales by singing and recognizing them aurally. He talks about the importance of hearing interval colors: He writes elsewhere, "And "Color" means... Many things, Chord changes... or Say Dom 7 has certain color. 9th chord... (Rt 3 b7 9th 5th) not shape , sound and color. So that you need to relearn all your chord voicing with those color, degree... That's why triads are best way to start."
Note: This is already a huge leap of faith. I've heard many guitar players relate the experience of seeing particular patterns and shapes on the guitar fretboard "light up." They talk about "seeing" the connection of chords, triads, scales, etc. In fact, VISUALIZING the fretboard seems like the GOAL of most guitar teaching systems (CAGED, Berklee, 3nps, etc).
Third: It's worth commenting on Tomo's aversion to creating handouts and other teaching materials. (I understand he's published some instructional materials in Japanese.) After so many years of teaching, I imagine he might have created a wealth of highly organized instructional and supplemental materials. Perhaps he has and will eventually publish them here. But for now, he seems to have made a conscious choice on this site to avoid them. I sometimes find this worrisome.
There's another way to see this, though. It's possible that Tomo feels that students should watch and learn by ear, rather than from paper. I suppose this would be very typical, especially among old blues players.
It may also reflect a more Japanese school of thought. I once had a martial arts instructor (a grand master from Japan) that believed an element of randomness was part of good training. He came from a very traditional background. During class, he discouraged too many questions, telling people to stop talking and just listen. When senior instructors asked him to design a written curriculum, he rejected the idea; partly (I think) because he believed discretion was part of good teaching, and partly because he was jealous of sharing his advanced techniques too broadly among students that weren't worthy.
That's all I have for now.
Please keep in mind my post is written from the perspective of a student, and not a critic. To me, being a good student means putting absolute faith in your instructor, and believing that the many long hours of practicing things that don't entirely make sense will eventually pay off. It's a big leap. A student shouldn't be too critical, because they don't have tools to see the bigger picture. But with so much at stake (many hours of hard work), I do feel that it's fair to try to determine, to the best of my ability, what Tomo's overall strategy consists of...particularly because he seems to reject so many foundational elements of other systems.