When I was about 12, I was hanging out at a friend’s house, wasting the day listening to The Dark Side of the Moon. His sister asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, quick as a flash, I replied that I wanted to be a guitar teacher and rather surprisingly, that’s exactly what happened.

Teaching guitar is what I do

I’ve never regarded teaching as something to do between gigs or as a way of propping up a music career, I actually like teaching, and I’ve always taken it seriously and that means lessons start and finish on time, they’re prepared properly, and the hour is about your playing, not an opportunity for me to sit there showing you how well I can play.

Over the years I’ve also invested heavily in my teaching and recording setup, creating an environment specifically designed for learning, playing and recording music.

More than just a guitar and an amp

Technology has become an increasingly useful part of the way I teach and now we can record things during a lesson, work with backing tracks, slow things down, analyse parts, experiment with sounds and use recording as a way of hearing exactly what’s going on in your playing.

Lessons are recorded tp mp3 and afterwards I provide a PDF summary of what we’ve covered and what you should work on during the week which gives you something concrete to refer back to rather than trying to remember an hour’s worth of information.

What I actually teach

My main interest is electric guitar and the music that surrounds it — blues, rock, funk and related styles — but the underlying aim is broader than learning a collection of songs or licks and I’m very interested in helping people understand the instrument: how the fretboard works, how chords and scales relate to one another, how rhythm and harmony work, and how to connect what you hear with what you play.

Different students want very different things, so I don’t expect everybody to follow the same route and so the lessons develop around what you’re trying to achieve.

Still interested after all these years

The nice thing about music is that you never really finish learning it, I’m still fascinated by guitars, music, recording, sound, technology and the process of figuring out how things work and that curiosity inevitably finds its way into my teaching.

And, several decades after giving that rather confident answer at the age of 12, I’m still teaching guitar.

“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.”

Frank Zappa