Category Archives: Brighton Guitar Tuition

This series of guitar lessons have all been taught to private guitar students in Brighton and Hove. In this series you will learn about many concepts such as improvisation, scale sequences and practising guitar.

Brighton Guitar Lessons for Christmas (Vouchers Available)

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If you are leaving it close to Christmas and thinking about a perfect gift for someone this year, then a guitar lesson voucher could be the perfect idea!

If you live in Brighton or the surrounding area and you think that someone special may love to wake up to voucher for guitar lessons starting in the new year, this will be a special present to remember.

Some of my longest standing students received their voucher in previous years and now can’t imagine a life without guitar in it!

So how much do they cost?

1x Voucher for 4 Guitar Lessons – £100

A perfect surprise gift this Christmas

1x Voucher for 5 Guitar Lessons – £120

For Someone Special!

1x Voucher for 10 Guitar Lessons – £200

Go all out with a voucher for 10 guitar lessons!

A lot of people also like to get advice on good quality cheap guitars to buy for a beginner at Christmas time and I am always more than happy to give them advice. So if you want to get advice on how much to spend on a guitar, whether to go for an electric, acoustic, or an electro acoustic, Ed Sheeran style half size or full then please contact me.

Alternatively if you are not sure if they will enjoy taking guitar lessons then you could always arrange an individual lesson to see how much they enjoy taking guitar lessons before dedicating to more lessons.

What did Bollywood Star Yana Gupta have to say about taking lessons with me….

“Learning with Tom has helped me to improve my guitar skills tremendously and also inspired me to spend more time practicing and enjoy the process of learning. The lessons are custom tailored to my needs, easy to understand and mainly fun. Tom is a fantastic teacher and also a very nice person to spend time with which is also important, especially when one needs encouragement in the process of learning. Thank you so much Tom.”

I specialise in beginner guitar lessons and bridging the gap from beginner to the intermediate stage of guitar.

Enquire About Your Half Price Guitar Lesson Now

or Call Tom on 07907674084

Merry Christmas!

Tom

Father and Son Guitar Lessons – A Breakthrough in Teaching

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This article is as much for guitar students as it is for guitar tutors, and will hopefully shed light upon an observation I have made in the process of teaching guitar.

Recently I was approached about guitar lessons for a 7 year old boy who was very excited to start learning guitar. At first I was apprehensive because it is quite challenging to teach a 7 year old how to play guitar, and in my 3 years of being a guitar teacher in Brighton, I had only done it once before. Children can often be very shy at this age and it can be hard to communicate with them enough for them to effectively learn the right amount each lesson.

At the end of the first lesson I was really impressed with how well he did. His father asked me about the amount of time the lessons should be for a boy of his age, and I told him that 30 minuites should be perfect. When I next arrived, his father wanted to know if I would be happy to teach him what I had taught his son, so we started to do back-to- back lessons where his son would do the first 30 minuites one-to-one with me, then his father would do 30 minuites one-to-one with me. The result the following week was amazing! His Dad had been having so much fun practicing guitar, and was able to spend time with his son practicing together and showing his son how to do anything he was not quite able to grasp on his own.

I think part of why this approach works so well is that a parent understands their child better than you could ever understand them. If you can all share the knowledge, then the parent can communicate and relate to their child in a way which motivates them best.

It was the first time I had ever done this type of approach to teaching guitar, but it has really stuck with me as a great way to get parents and their children to bond doing something they both think is fun, exciting and educational.
In time, I hope to set up a group in Brighton for parents to learn guitar with their children, meet other parents who are also taking part in this activity and eventually to run an evening class where all the parents and children can perform.

So if you are a parent considering learning guitar yourself, or a guitar tutor looking for inspiration, then I hope this slightly different approach to teaching guitar has inspired you. Lets keep guitar fun!

How To Be a Successful Guitar Tutor

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Be The Guitar Tutor is the soon to be released eBook outlining exactly what it takes to become the best guitar tutor in your area! All of this information is the product of Your Guitar Tutor detailing all the steps it has taken to get it where it is today- running a successful and professional guitar tuition business.

If you have dreamt of earning a living from teaching guitar then you are certainly not alone! I had this exact dream as I was growing up and after one failed attempt, juggling different jobs, university and adjusting to life in the city, I finally cracked it. I am going to share with you a detailed story of how Your Guitar Tutor got to be a successful guitar teaching service in an incredibly competitive area of England.

You are going to learn about the personal skills that make you a successful guitar tutor:

Your motifs for teaching guitar, what is it about this entrepreneurial journey that you think you will like
Your personality and visualising your self as a brand
Understanding the incredible perks of the job
Understanding the potential downfalls and risk associated with running your own guitar tuition business. I will be sharing stories of my own struggles when learning from mistakes along the way, so you don’t make the same errors.
Networking- meeting people who can help you reach your goal, understand the importance of being confident and friendly with new people.
Sharing your dream- how to talk about your new idea with colleagues, friends, family and strangers to spread the word and build buzz in your area.
Action Plans- creating time specific goals over a period of months up to a year for the launch of your business.
Being organised- organisation is a key factor in running your own venture, tools and tips to help you become more organised
Using your time to arrange lesson slots, plan lessons and possibly travel

You are also going to learn about the business skills that make you a successful guitar tutor:

How much it might cost you to start your own guitar teaching business- fully understand what you will need to start up.
Competition- Understanding how to analyse the market and the competition in your area to build a service that is needed and seen as the ‘go to place’ for guitar lessons.
Branding- Understanding how you want your business to be thought about and the image it has.
Setting your prices
Teaching from home or travelling to your students- analysing if it is feasible to teach from your own home or if you will travel to lessons.
Finding your first student- early day incentives
Marketing- sale periods to boost lesson enquiries, gift vouchers for Christmas
Being legitimate
Purchasing a website name (domain name)
Finding a great designer- knowing the importance of how anything connected to your business looks and finding a designer within your budget. Being resourceful and not spending your budget on design alone.
Creating a good website- knowing what you need from a website for guitar tuition in your area. Understanding what a good website designer is and how much to pay for what you need.
Advertising
Promoting your service- Google adwords, free online advertising such as Gumtree, blogging about yourself on your own website
Groupon- knowing when you are ready to take your business up a level, employ more tutors or stay solo.
Organising lesson slots to suit your students and you, creating rate time prices to get the most students in one day

Plus much more helpful information to help you build your own guitar tuition service and be the best in your area

Tom Clark

Improvisation On The Guitar

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Hi there,

How do musicians create such intricate lines of music on the guitar? It seems to be completely made up on the spot but in actual fact improvisation is composed ideas from the past being re-organised to a particular musical situation. If you ever talk to a great improvising guitarist they will find it hard to quickly describe what they just did in an improvisation. This is because ideas can come from so long ago or after subconsciously hearing a song on the radio that morning.

Improvisation boils down to a player who has a vocabulary and an understanding of the instances in which the phrase or ideas can be used when improvising. If you study a particular guitarist for long enough or listen to them a lot, you will start to hear their characteristics coming out in your own playing. If you listen to a few different players and study their music then you can create interesting hybrids of styles. Take for instance Marilyn Manson’s guitarist John 5 and his interesting mix of metal and country guitar.

Improvisation can be viewed like speech where if you think about how all the words you say in conversation are not rehearsed. It is only because of our grasp of the language that we are able to manipulate phrases we commonly use to suit the situation. If you talk to a person who is attempting to learn English as their foreign language you will notice they don’t have this flow straight away and can sound very rehearsed in conversation. After years of hearing the English language in use they become more fluent just like the guitarist who develops a vocabulary of licks, riffs, chords and chord progressions.

The way we interact with the music we improvise to can also be compared to a conversation we have with someone. In conversation you wouldn’t just talk at someone for 30 seconds before they even fit a word in, you leave space for their thoughts to be voiced and then reply or expand on the subject in hand. You may talk with more emotion to someone you know well for example excitement may be expressed by a raised pitch in your voice or talking faster with laughing at times. This can be related to improvisation in the sense that our phrases played on the guitar don’t have to be completely steady and don’t have to stay at one volume, we may play really soft or really hard at time to express an emotion.

Someone who when in conversation commonly changes subject may not have enough knowledge to voice an opinion on the subject, so they may change subject subtly to avoid embarrassment. As guitarists we may change subject (phrasing ideas) when we exhaust our vocabulary in an improvisation and this is completely fine as long as we learn how to make that transition smoothly.

If you are interested in learning more with us then please see Be The Guitarist for a complete guide to chords, scales, modes and arpeggios plus understanding the guitar in greater detail. Everything included in the eBook will develop your ability to improvise freely on the guitar.

I hope you enjoyed your lesson,

Tom Clark

Blues Guitar Lesson- 12 Bar Blues Max Clilverd (Part 1)

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Hey there, Your Guitar Tutor have been taking trips from Brighton to London to film guest guitar lessons with the phenomenal Fusion guitarist Max Clilverd. Max’s lessons are on Blues guitar and the 12 bar form and how you can slowly add more elements to adapt its harmonic content and bring a simple Blues to life. Throughout this series you will learn to take a Blues from its most form to a Jazz Blues.

Max discussed the 12 bar Blues form in A using chords I- IV and V. This is the best place to start and will allow you to jam with other musicians and share musical ideas.

12 Bar Blues

A7- A7- A7- A7

D9- D9- A7- A7

E9- D9- A9- E9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBggiVpDLwQ&feature=relmfu

You may have be wondering whyhe uses the D9 and E9 chords in this Blues, this is simply an alternative to playing all dominant 7th chords and each dom9 chord be switched out for 7ths if you wished.

Chords for the 12 Bar Blues

Simple 12 Bar Blues in A

When playing along with Max it is important that you try to adjust your feel to fit the rhythm he is playing the chords with. This is just one way you could play the Blues but it is certainly a great place to start.

The foundation of this blues is built from the major scale and the names I- IV and V are the chord numbers relative to the tones of the major scale. If you want to learn more about major scale theory then please read Be The Guitarist.

Tom Clark

What is Rhythm? Rhythmic Notation

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Hi there, this lesson is all about rhythmic notation and why having a grasp of it will benefit your guitar playing and allow you to express yourself through the guitar more easily.

Rhythmic Notation and TAB

Rhythm could be described as accented groupings of time and it forms the basis of everything we do as guitar players and musicians in general. Rhythm can exist without melody but melody can’t exist without rhythm.

We measure rhythm by a steady beat and the rate of the beat is measured in ‘Beats Per a Minuite’ or BPM. This basically means the number of beats in a minute, so 60BPM would mean there are 60 beats in a minute, 100 BPM would mean 100 beats per a minute and so on. The higher the number, the faster the pace.

When we read and write rhythms we are looking at or writing notes. There are different values/ durations of notes that have particular names and if you see a dot after a note it means you add half the note value to the existing note value shown. If you see a quarter note (Crotchet) and a dot after it you need to add half a beat to the existing one beat duration so you have a note or chord lasting 1.5 beats.

As guitarists we usually gravitate towards TAB which is basically a simple way for us to read the notes and rhythm of a piece of music or exercise. Music notation is more complicated and often avoided because over the years more and more guitarist find no use for music notation when TAB exists. However, both music notation and TAB share the same principle of dividing a line of music notation or TAB up into bars/ measures. These bars have to make musical sense so the note values inside the bars have to add up or it is simply incorrectly written or out of time. We use ‘bar lines’ to separate a line of music or TAB and it is in these bars where the music has to add up.

By adding up I mean that the fraction shown on the left such as common time 4/4 dictates how many beats per a bar and what value the notes hold. Most music is in 4/4 (four- four) which means that there are 4 beats in a bar and the total notes in a bars value adds up to 4 crotchets. This basic pulse allows musicians to create endless variations of rhythms which make music interesting yet not too unpredictable.

Rhythmic notation consists of 5 horizontal lines moving left to right and TAB consists of six horizontal lines moving left to right where each line represents a guitar string.

Common Time Signatures

4/4 = four beats per a bar and quarter notes

3/4= three beats per a bar and quarter notes

6/8= six beats per a bar and eighth notes

7/8= seven beats ber a par and eighth notes

I want you to notice the same melody being played in both examples but because of the use of eighth notes in the second example the example one melody that lasts 2 bars now only last one bar. This means that an eighth note is half of a quarter note.

Music Notation and TAB on Guitar

Music Notation and TAB on Guitar 2

I hope you have learnt something new from this free lesson and if you want to learn guitar with Your Guitar Tutor then please read the eBooks where you will find Complete Beginner Guitar and Intermediate to Advanced eBooks.

Tom Clark

How To Work Out Songs On Guitar By Ear- Part 4

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Hey there, welcome to part 4 of How To Work Out Songs On Guitar By Ear. In lesson you will be learning some of the finer details of working out songs by ear.

So far in this series I have focused on getting you to be able to listen to a song and work out the chords by figuring out the key. By using a capo you have learnt that you can limit a possible 12 keys down to just 2 by using chords shapes from the G box or C box. Hopefully this information alone has helped you a lot but now I am going to let you know even more to try to make this second nature for you.

Your goal is to be able to hear in terms of Roman Numerals when you listen to the chords being played in a song, by thinking this way you will have a name for the sound of a G chord moving to the D chord- I- V (1-5) and you will have a name for a G chord moving to an Em chord- I- VI (1-6). This all relates to the key of a song and so it is important that you can find the correct key as discussed in Part 3. If you wish to know about key centres in greater detail then please see Be The Guitarist.

Also I feel I must mention that this method of using a G box or C box is great for the 90% of players who just want to get stuck in and play some songs on guitar and the thousands of singer- songwriters that make a living out of using a capo and thinking this way. However, some of you may want to understand the guitar in much greater detail and be able to play any chord you wish, anywhere on the neck. For you I recommend that you learn the method discussed throughout this series but also learn from the ground up and understand scales, key centres, modes and the CAGED system at the same time.

The Roman Numeral System

Below are the roman numerals next to the chord name for both the key of G and key of C. The idea is that you can think of chord IV as C when in the G box (Key of G). This way you will be able to hear a I- IV- V chord progression and play it on the guitar much easier because you have recognised this movement as a sound. In a key you also find a VII chord but you will not use it anytime soon for it is rarely used in popular music.

Key of G

I- G

II- Am

III- Bm

IV- C

V- D

VI- Em

Key of C

I- C

II- Dm

III- Em

IV- F

V- G

VI- Am

How to Use This Information

So with this knowledge you may want to get stuck in straight away and if so, then here is an example of this approach to working songs out by ear put into practise.

Ok so we can take a popular track such as Set Fire To The Rain and study the chords used in each section to break down the track.

Adele ‘Set Fire To The Rain’ Chords

(Capo 5^th fret)

Intro

Am- C- G- Dm

Verse 1

Am- C- G- Dm

Am- C- G- F

Am- C- G- Dm

Am- C- G- F

Looking at the intro with your knowledge of the key of C you can now quite quickly see that these are chords found in the C box (key 0f C). A minor is the VI (6) chord, C is the I (1) chord, G is the V (5) chord and D minor is the II (2) chord. Chord progressions are when you move between chords and you find there are some really common progressions that get used to great affect time and time again. This chord progression used in the intro is a VI- I- V- II and is not quite as common as a I- IV- V- I but is still a popular choice.

Keep a look out for more guitar lessons or subscribe to get notified when new lessons are out.

Tom Clark

Guitar Scale Runs- Four Note Motifs Part 1

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Hello, today you will be learning about the Four Note Motifs that are found all over many forms of music, but in particular rock guitar based music. These scale sequences are usually played at a fast pace with a fairly distorted guitar tone and this is only achieved by practising the sequence below at a very slow pace. By learning the four note sequences you will be able to execute flurries of notes to form parts of solos that will grab the listeners attention.

At first this passage will seem daunting because there are so many notes being played. Once you understand that it is a sequence and therefor a pattern is repeated through the scale, it becomes less daunting because you can hear where the passage is going.

Tackle the sequence four notes at a time and once learnt, attempt to play the diatonic notes harder than the rest of the notes in the sequence. This is known as accenting and will bring some life to a flat sounding run.

Sequence 1

When you have learnt the notes of the sequence, turn on your metronome set to 60 bpm and try to play two notes per a beat and then when this becomes easy, try four notes per a beat as shown in the sequence above.

Sequence 2

Sequence 2 is played in 1/8th notes which means you play 2 notes per a beat instead of 4 and uses the C major scale in the A shape form. Play the sequences in the remaining four shapes of the C major scale so that you can connect the scale shapes up and down the neck. If you don’t know how to play the scale in different positions then see Be The Guitarist for easy to understand scale diagrams and full explanations.

Come back soon to learn two more Four Note Motifs.

Tom Clark

Guitar Scale Runs- Three Note Motifs Part 2

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Hey there, this lesson will be focusing on two different scale runs in the key of C major that have a different sequence. These two sequences will provide you with some interesting ways to practise your scales and modes when running up and down the scales in an ordinary fashion becomes boring.

Ensure to practise the sequences with a metronome starting out at 60 bpm and only increase the tempo when you are finding it easy at the current tempo. Try to accent each diatonic note of the scale, this means play the 1st, 4th, 7th, 10th, 13th etc note of the sequences harder than the other notes. This will help you build your dynamics so that you can learn to play loud and soft at different times.

Sequence 3

As with all the sequences I have been teaching throughout this series, I recommend you learn the sequence as it is shown and then experiment with idea. By experiment I mean that you should understand and absorb the sound of the sequence and then try to take another shape of the scale and recreate the sequence. To do this you will need to know all the positions of at least your major scale so that you can choose another position of the scale and then work out how to play the sequence.

If you want to learn your scales then see Be The Guitarist for easy to understand diagrams and full explanations.

Sequence 4

Keep practising and I hope you have enjoyed the Three note motif lessons. Come back for more lessons on guitar scale sequences where you will learn how to play Four Note Motifs.

Tom Clark

Guitar Scale Runs- Three Note Motifs Part 1

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Hello there, this lesson is all about the scale runs we hear in many forms of music, in particular rock guitar based music. Our aim is for you to have some patterns under your belt to pull out on your command and execute with ease. If practised slowly with a focus on accuracy there is no reason why you could not achieve high speed runs in a matter of months. Also worth mentioning is that I have designed this exercise to be in 6/8 time signature, this means you are playing 6 notes per a bar. You could do this in common 4/4 also, so why not try that one time.

Sequence 1

Here is the second motif we can create by playing a variation on the original sequence we have just learnt. This sequence relies on playing what are known as ‘Triads’ but through the A shaped C major scale, why not try this pattern up the A string pulling out notes from the D and G string?

Sequence 2

Once you understand the sound of the sequence and exactly what you are doing with the scale in use you can recreate the sequence in the remaining shapes of the C major scale. This will give you greater command of the fretboard so that you do not feel limited to a certain area on the neck when soloing or writing parts on your guitar.

Try and pick the diatonic notes of the scale harder to work on your dynamics and if you want to know all about scale then please see Be The Guitarist.

Come back for part 2 and 3 of the Three Note Motifs where you will learn four more scale runs to experiment with.

Tom Clark