Hello, welcome to Guitar Lessons Basingstoke.

My primary aim as a guitar teacher is to make sure my students enjoy music. The reason for this is simple - playing the guitar is by far and away the single largest contributor towards improving on guitar, and students are more inclined to play the guitar if they find it a joy to do so.

About 70% of people who come to me are complete beginners; 25% have been playing long enough to have gained some competence, but have a few unknown unknowns; and 5% have a specialist interest, such as: Western Swing, Flamenco, fingerstyle jazz, compositional techniques for instrumental acoustic guitar to name a few I've encountered.

But now to disappoint that 5% - I've been doing this a long time now - I taught my first paid guitar lesson in 2004, and started teaching full-time in 2010, and I'm going to have to let you specialists down, because I've become a specialist myself. I now specialise in delighting the 95% of my customers. To do that I had to a) become a content creator as well as a teacher, and b) resolve to teach a wide range of playing styles and techniques.

And so I now have regular commitments to create and improve the online materials that cater to this majority, so that they can receive the best of both worlds: face-to-face lessons accompanied by quality online tuition corresponding to every lesson taught. This way, my students never leave the lesson unsure of what to practice. They have 24/7 access to video, diagrams, and detailed text to help them. But essentially that means I can't warrant the time it takes to produce a similarly high-quality learning experience for an individual student exclusively interested in a niche corner of musicianship.

My initial approach is to start people from the beginning, run them past what they already know as quickly as possible whilst keeping an eye out for blind spots, and then once I've identified where the challenges lie, begin making advances in the following areas so as to establish a very solid foundation:

• Training the hands and ears so that the student can fluently execute an array of techniques so as to faithfully reproduce music in a diversity of styles.
• Understanding rhythm inside and out.
• Getting to grips with with the CAGED system, the minor pentatonic scale, a bit of music theory, and eventually interval awareness and the art of finding the notes you "hear" on the fretboard.

Of the many people I've taught, those who learn most thoroughly; and therefore have the most fun; and therefore continue to play the guitar after many months are engaged in this project, benefitting from my private tuition as well as the ample library of supporting material I've been accumulating since 2020.

I thank you for visiting Guitar Lessons Basingstoke, I hope to see you soon.

Sean