Enthusiastic songwriter and guitarist, helping you play your favourite songs with confidence!

It was great to meet Robin and learn more about the music she enjoys. We chatted about some of her favourite artists, including Justin Bieber and explored a few songs that could be great goals to work towards, such as Love Yourself. With its simple three-chord structure, it’s a great song to aim for and I played it for Robin so she could get a feel for what she might be able to achieve over the next six months.

It was lovely to hear that Robin had been gifted two guitars by her neighbour, which gave her the opportunity to get started with lessons. We went through the names of the guitar strings and began building the foundations that will help her understand chords and develop her playing as she progresses.

We also talked about Count Me Out by Shadé Jennifer, a song Robin mentioned she’d been listening to a lot recently. This led us to explore how scales can be used to create our own melodies around chords, helping develop a more personal style and express ourselves through the guitar.

Robin has some great musical interests to draw inspiration from and I’m looking forward to helping her build her skills, explore the songs she loves and discover what she can create for herself. Most importantly, I hope she enjoys the journey and has fun learning!

It was great to get to know Julie better over our call and to understand more about the type of music she really loves. We chatted about artists such as James Taylor and Cat Stevens.

We started the lesson by working through some basic chords, including A major and E minor.

After the lesson, I sent Julie a video going over the chords we had worked on and we also looked at some of her longer-term goal guitar goals.

She mentioned that she'd love to be able to play Fire and Rain one day, which is a fantastic song to work towards, as it's both musically brilliant and a great way to develop the finger-style techniques that are such an incredible part of playing acoustic guitar.

Julie has enormous potential with the instrument, so keep learning, keep experimenting and most importantly have fun!

It was a pleasure meeting Julie and I’m looking forward to seeing her progress!

I had a lesson with Elijah, who has been playing guitar for some time now. I asked him what inspired him to start playing, which was a great opportunity to get to know him better and understand what he wants to achieve with the instrument. His main goals are to be able to play guitar solos and riffs. He’s particularly interested in rock and blues, with influences like The Clash and Nirvana.

During the lesson, we focused on a blues approach, working with the minor pentatonic scale and how it can be used to play around chord changes and create riffs in between chords. We worked through a classic progression, moving from E major to A major and then to B major, applying the minor pentatonic scale over the progression.

In terms of strengths, Elijah picks things up quickly. He has a good ear and is already able to listen to a melody, identify the notes, and play them back on the guitar. An area for improvement would be strumming patterns, but at the moment his main focus is on plucking, soloing, and improvisation, which are more important to him right now. That’s the direction we’ll continue to focus on. For the next lesson, we’ll be working on the riff from Michael Jackson’s Beat It.