Guitar Lessons in Forest Lake, MN

Instruments: Guitar Electric Guitar Classical Guitar Acoustic Guitar

My earliest musical memories were of Led Zeppelin, Guns 'n' Roses, and Jimi Hendrix. When I started taking guitar lessons at eleven years old, I pursued the powerful distorted guitar riffs from my classic rock idols. After learning about jazz in high-school, I began to seek out knowledge of every genre of music. McNally-Smith helped me tremendously. I joined a wide range of ensembles, from blues to indie-rock, classical to gypsy jazz. Read More

Instruments: Piano Guitar Drums Mallet Percussion Orchestral Percussion Conga Latin Percussion Music Keyboard Electric Guitar Djembe

Whatever type of music they are interested in playing, I find several examples to pull from that and use it as teaching material and relate it back to our foundational training. This keeps our lessons fun, engaging, and rewarding. For Drum set, I teach from Tommy Igoe's "Groove Essentials 1.0/2.0" and John Riley's "The Art of Bop Drumming". I encourage students to perform a recital but I like to stretch the definition of a "recital". Read More

Instruments: Piano Guitar Voice Drums

It is hard to explain about teaching method for voice lesson because the voice is not visible. When I was studying a doctoral program I studied hard about vocal pedagogy. Generally, voice teachers abstractly tend to teach their students. So, I have been emphasizing how to know their body mechanism first before letting them sing. Actually, when we sing many muscles work together but they do not know which muscle works. Read More

Instruments: Guitar Voice

For "pop-style" singing I tend to borrow some useful vocal warm-ups from Roger Love's "Singing with the Stars",but most of them are modified or tailored versions of scale warm-ups. For structuring lessons I follow the structure of the book "Singing for Dummies" because I have found it to go through the modules of learning to sing in an order that makes a lot of sense and it is a good foundation to refer to. Read More

Instruments: Guitar Electric Guitar Classical Guitar Acoustic Guitar

I am a dedicated and experienced guitar teacher with an excellent understanding of the learning process, who loves working with students to help them reach their goals. I earned a Master of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Minnesota. I have performed across the US, Europe, and China, as a chamber musician, soloist, and member of the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet. Read More

Instruments: Guitar

Over the years I have done everything from playing in the local "Battle of The Bands", opening for rocker Marshall Crenshaw with my band "Caf Society" and playing with jazz great Vincent York at The Montreux Detroit Jazz Festival. I have been teaching for over 20 years and really enjoy teaching and helping others, whether they want to play for their own enjoyment. Read More

Instruments: Guitar Bass Guitar Electric Guitar Classical Guitar Acoustic Guitar

My teaching experience can be dated back to high school, where I taught friends and family after school or in the summer. I started to take teaching music lessons seriously within the last couple of years. I love passing this onto my students and giving them the tools to succeed on guitar. I can see from the results of my teaching, that consistency is key. Every time we are having a lesson, I teach the student a new concept and elaborate on their prior knowledge. Read More