Information About Phil - Hereford teacher

Personal Description:

I've been playing guitar for about 19 years. I heard Metallica's 'Black' album and a song by a band called Giant, and just had to learn how to play. I taught myself initially and played in a few bands, but realised that I could only go so far without help, so I enrolled at London Music School to take their 1 year performance diploma. I graduated from there in 2000 with distinction and continued to play in bands whilst starting to write and record my own music.

The older I got the more I began to love jazz and started to incorporate the more exotic scales and harmonies into my own brand of heavy metal music, combined with the more progressive elements of rock. These days I play an 8 string electric guitar as well as a standard 6 string and sometimes dabble in percussive fingerstyle acoustic playing. I also continue to record my own music in my own home studio as well as being involved in a local professional studio.

Tutoring Experience:

I've been teaching sporadically for several years, although in the last 18 months I have been teaching as my sole employment. The majority of my teaching is one to one, all ages, styles and abilities, although these days I also teach groups of 8 - 11 year olds and have been approached to do some peripatetic work in local schools.

My lessons are held at a fully equipped local professional recording studio, far more suitable than my own home.

Tutoring Approach:

I believe guitar lessons should be fun, particularly for beginners. I know that the guitar can be a frustrating instrument to learn and it's easy to focus on the things you can't do rather than take encouragement from the things you can. As students develop their basic skills on the guitar, we can begin to explore creativity in the form of improvisation, we can learn favourite songs and begin to understand how the pros create all this wonderful music we hear on a daily basis.

Guitarists are also notoriously poor at reading standard music notation so this skill can also be developed, tied in with songs that we might learn.

In terms of intermediate and advanced level students, I bring in theory to back up techniques and ideas but with the main focus still on playing the guitar and having fun with it. Improvisation is still key, as I believe it is the purest form of expression when playing any instrument, so whilst we might learn from the ides of respected artists I encourage my students to use and build on these ideas in their own compositions.