Information About Paul - Bo'ness teacher

Personal Description:

Musician shares secrets of guitar, piano and singing… I'm a 37year old musician with over thirty years experience playing multiple instruments. I have a BSc in Audio Technology and a HND in Sound Engineering and hope to study Music Therapy at a postgradua**Contact Detail Removed**vel. As a musician, I started classical training at the age of four with the violin. Changing to viola around age nine, I also played lower brass instruments for 7years (Tuba/Euphonium) whilst singing in choirs all the time. In my early teens, my interests shifted to the world of rock and jazz and I began teaching myself instruments by ear (Guitar, bass, drums, keyboards). It was from this point that music really started to make sense and come alive for me.

Tutoring Experience:

I have over ten years experience tutoring freelance (one on one) and teach a group guitar lesson (8 children, 2 teachers) once a week for a local charity. I currently tutor around twenty five students a week with ages ranging from four years old up to seventy years old. As you can imagine, I'm used to working with (and responding to) a diverse set of needs.

Tutoring Approach:

Although I'm classically trained, I believe that there's something incredibly powerful gained by listening to music that you love and trying to play along, developing skills in improvisation from the start. This process is followed by a huge percentage of people who wrote the songs we know and love. I'm not trying to belittle the importance of theory, on the contrary, as an adult I find myself thirsty to understand new concepts that I can integrate into my playing. But, I believe that a whilst a theory-heavy start may work for a small number of mathematically minded individuals, for most people it can undermine their ability to immerse themselves in the music they are trying to understand. Besides, classically un-trained musicians DO develop a theoretical framework to work within, but they have done it with a different kind of intuition, the ear-training involved making it an arguably better approach to learning.
Ideally our lessons together would involve a little bit of theory to help you contextualise what you are learning, but mostly be about playing together and having fun. My belief is that everyone has an inner-musician waiting to be helped outward and that with the right mentoring/role models, any student can reach capabilities beyond anything they could previously imagine, not just in music, but in life too. I have a deep understanding of role of the music teacher in helping people to realise their full potentials.

The good news is that if you're thinking about learning music, chances are that music has affected you (or spoken to you) in some meaningful way already. Music is everywhere, you have already assimilated a huge part of it's structures into your brain without knowing it, just by listening to it…