Sam Berrill

Within the lessons, we will cover topics suited to your current level and interest. For example, if you are brand new to the guitar, I will aim to make the guitar as fun as possible from the beginning by learning songs straight away. Once some hand strength and coordination have been built up, we will slowly start to introduce theory and break down what is happening in the songs you are learning. Other students may be more advanced and, for example, may have taught themselves to play but now want to understand theory for either song writing or improvising. For these students I will be able to help show them theory through a mixture of analysis of scores, some pen-and-paper breakdowns, and various musical chords, scales, and exercises to understand how music works.

Unless it is your first lesson, each lesson will begin with me asking you how your practice has gone and if you have done any of the homework I might have assigned. From there, we can decide whether more work needs to be done on the previous lesson’s topic or if we can move on. From there, I like to get as much information in as possible, so I will explain, give an example, then ask you to either try to play what I have shown or let me know you understand and write it down. Once we are happy you understand and know how to apply the information we can then move on to the next topic of the lesson Each of the things I teach per lesson will connect to one another, and we should be able to start applying them together in the latter half of the lesson The reason for this approach is I think that as long as you practice all of what is taught in each lesson a lot more can be learned than if I were to teach one thing and we spent the entire lesson on it, as some teachers do. At the end of the day, you can’t perfect what you learn in the lesson anyway—practice is still required.