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“What was it like teaching guitar to Bollywood star and worldwide model Yana Gupta?”

Hey there Your Guitar Tutor students and followers!

I received this question earlier today and thought I would share my response with you all as it was a great experience and an exciting challenge for Your Guitar Tutor.

Your Guitar Tutor's First Celebrity Student!

Teaching Yana was an absolute pleasure as she was a humble, modest and dedicated student. Being so down to earth made teaching her a relaxed experience, but she sure did learn quick.

An interesting point to note is that when you picture a celebrity and their dedication to hobbies, you may think they never actually end up getting to spend time doing the activity. However, Yana was very surprising and week after week excelled and applied everything she learnt in the lessons.

Worth mentioning is the fact that Yana was in the middle of a career change from her Bollywood stardom to a musical journey. She had written some incredible songs with excellent producers and the product was some seriously catchy music that you couldn’t help but end up singing in your head for hours after.

It seemed Yana’s main challenge was to get good enough on guitar to be able to play the songs from her unreleased album so that she could perform the songs in her own time without the band behind her. I was faced with a very exciting challenge as I now had to take the knowledge she had on guitar and develop it quickly so she could get out their and perform as soon as possible. Yana was a relatively clean canvas to work with so I didn’t have to take time undoing years of misunderstanding or confusion.

When you know you play a direct part in the outcome of a persons performance it is very fun, but when you know this persons career change is being highly awaited by press across the world it becomes a whole different story.

So week after week Yana would tackle learning her own songs on the guitar and was improving at an impressive pace. Combined with learning her own songs she was requesting to learn hit songs from bands such as Coldplay, so it was obvious she was pretty serious about broadening her knowledge on the instrument.

My most interesting experience of teaching Yana was when she had taken the CAGED chords I had taught her in the first few weeks of lessons and recorded herself, added drums and flute and then wrote a song and performed it to me for feedback. This was the perfect example of how a student becomes more than just a student and perhaps this was a reflection on how she had been so successful in her career already.

Yana went on to take her music across the world to India where her fame first rocketed.

To Your Success

Tom@YourGuitarTutor

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