Guitar

From your first experience to breaking through plateaus, learn guitar from a patient and experienced professional musician.

I am a working musician who leads (guitar, vocals, songwriter) the Seattle indie-rock band The Northern Light. I teach a variety of musical genres across all skill levels on acoustic and electric guitars as well as the electric bass.

I took my first guitar lesson at 14 and pretty soon immersed my life in the instrument. I soon realized that learning musical instrument (or anything of value, really) is not just a steady climb in skill and capability…it’s a series of steps or plateaus.

I bring a balanced approach to learning the guitar. I am not a single-genre teacher. I’m able to help you gain broad skills for playing blues, rock, classical, folk or fingerstyle music. I strongly the value the ability to read music and to understand music theory and incorporate these into our lessons. For all players our focus is on fun and fundamentals, giving you a solid foundation on which to build a lifetime of musical enjoyment.

For the majority of my students, I incorporate a teaching method such as that published by Hal Leonard (or the Berklee Method for students with more experience/previous piano background etc).. I always augment our teaching method with additional material based on the student’s desired learning path with favorite artists, classical pieces etc.

I may suggest that a young student start with the ukulele, which is easy to play for small hands, has a lot of relevant tunes for smaller folks and the cost of the instrument is really low. All the music theory and string/physical skills transfer over directly from the uke to guitar.

Book a trial lesson to visit my studio and meet with me and play some guitar. This is a great way to learn more about my teaching style and to get a running start at learning the guitar. Click the following link to open a new window in Calendly or schedule through my Contact page.

Guitar Resources

I’ve included a set of links to online videos and resources to showcase my guitar playing and teaching philosophy. Enjoy!

Here’s a video from The Northern Light’s show in January 2020, about 17 minutes of our set…you can get a good idea of my guitar playing from this video. Everything here from the folky/bluesy/introspective to heavier stuff. Enjoy!

Over time, I am adding extra content (exercises and learning segments that you can play at your own pace) to my Youtube channel. This material is free. You can find my channel here.

Here is an original song played in acoustic fingerstyle. The song is called York Mills 89.