What can people expect to gain from coming to Rock Guitar Lessons? Students of Rock Guitar Lessons can expect to receive guitar tuition specifically catered to electric guitarists, focusing on the things an electric guitar player must understand in order to really improve in contemporary rock based styles.
Have you ever met anyone you can’t teach? I get asked this a lot and the answer is always no. Throughout my career, as a general guitar teacher and a specialist electric guitar teacher, I’ve taught a lot of different students, some that warned me they would be a challenge. They all ended up being able to play. Everyone has their own idea of what they want to do with their guitar playing, some people want to be the lead guitarist in a band, others want to play for themselves to relax after work, there’s no wrong or right. It’s my job to understand each student’s goal and work out what we need to do in order to achieve it.
How long does it take for a beginner to get good? It really depends on how much the students apply themselves. Improvement is made up of two primary things, practice quantity and practice quality. The more quality practice a student does the quicker they’ll improve, it’s that simple.
What are some of the main problems you encounter with your students? For the students who are still at the beginning, they want to learn from a teacher who specialises in the style of playing they want to master, they also want to learn the foundational things that will have them quickly improving in the style they want to play. For the guitarists who are of a more intermediate to advanced level, their main concern is breaking out of a constant feeling of being stuck in a rut. This feeling is caused by two things mainly, a limited understanding of theory and limited technical ability.
Limited theoretical knowledge will cause you to use the same chords, scales and musical concepts in your playing and songwriting over and over, and limited technical ability will cause you to play everything the same way again and again. With these particular guitar players I first work out what they currently know, then work to uncover all the things they don’t know that are causing them to play and write the same kind of things over and over again.
We then look at technique, there are ways of playing the guitar that make everything easier and there are ways of playing that make things harder. With most established guitar players, the first few lessons are spent rewiring bad technical habits, then we start cultivating more efficient technique, which never takes very long for these types of guitar players. Once these types of guitar players get a good understanding of these important fundamentals, so many new creative doors open up for them, as a teacher it’s really exciting to watch.
