Guitar & Bass Lessons

My background:
I've been teaching guitar and bass lessons professionally at Mannella Guitars in the Penn Hills area for the last 10 years.
I attended CCAC and Pitt as a music major studying with Tim Bedner, Chad Sauerwein, and Joe Negri along the way; as such, my formal education lies primarily in jazz, but over the years I've had a wide range of playing and teaching experience in most any genre of popular music. I've played in bands doing anything from indie rock to psychobilly, country to metal, and of course a generous serving of classic rock and blues (this is Pittsburgh after all!).

My Philosophy:
My goal is essentially to ensure that the student comes away with a firm grasp of how to play the instrument, not simply having to memorize where to place the fingers to produce a few songs.
Acquiring an understanding of how and why the music that you're playing is put together the way it is, will afford you a freedom and fluency on the instrument that is not attainable by simply memorizing an unending string of songs.
Such fluency allows you to improvise solos or compose your own parts in a way that has direction and meaning, as opposed to blindly groping for notes,licks,chords that "sound good" together on a trial and error basis.
It also makes learning songs much easier since now, when you hear all those notes coming out of your speakers, you no longer perceive them as a disorganized wall of sound, but as logically arranged familiar structures, many of which you've likely already learned.
What it boils down to is that most types of music really do draw on a consistent vocabulary and grammar, and if you already speak the language, learning or producing new material is not a tall order.
And once again, that is precisely my goal: to cultivate in my students a fluency in the language of music, so that they can eventually study and grow independently without need of a teacher like me to translate for them.

My Approach:
By and large, I find that students come in two varieties, so I'll address them separately in this section:

Type A: "I recently purchased this contraption with 6 strings but when I wiggle my fingers, I don't sound like Eddie Van Halen (or even Neil Young). "What do I do?" In other words, a complete beginner, someone starting from scratch. This scenario is fairly straightforward. I like it, because it gives me the opportunity to build a solid understanding of technique and theory from the start, so that you're not developing bad habits or making things harder than they need to be right out of the gate. There is however, a bit of a breaking in period associated with the first time player, during which I usually emphasize simple memorization-based things like learning your notes, learning to read simple rhythms, and memorizing chord shapes. To this end, I typically recommend a method book to get us reading notes and rhythms at the very beginning. Then as the student begins to get some of this basic vocabulary together, and their hands begin to work properly, I try to get us working, as soon as possible, on repertoire (songs, that is), and some basic theory. How quickly all this happens can vary from one individual to another. It's true, we all start with different hands, but by far the most important factor in this process is simply how much time and effort the student can put into practicing these concepts between lessons, which is another thing I try to instill in a student's musical education from the start; how to practice! (It sounds simple, but it bears repeating.)

Type B: "I've been playing for a while now, and I feel like I'm in a rut, like I've hit a wall, like I don't know how to get better." This second scenario is also extremely common, and often results when a player has played long enough to recognize this notion of freedom and fluency on the instrument well enough to know that they don't have it. They aren't sure how to get it, but they've found that their current methods (most likely learning a lot of songs) are not getting them where they want to go. My approach here obviously isn't set in stone, but basically involves assessing where the student is at, and trying to fill in the holes in their variously acquired knowledge. Usually the trouble stems from a deficiency in some basic skill set: theory, ear training, or often just not knowing the fretboard well enough. With students of this type I often end up working on things like how to improvise a solo over chord changes (instead of just running a one-size-fits-all scale such as minor pentatonic), how to hear intervals and rhythms, and how to organize the fretboard so that you can immediately see the notes you need (in other words, if you're playing over an Am7 chord, it's nice to be able to look down and "just see" all the A's, C's, E's, and G's "light up.").

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