Mike Keeney - Founder
I have had amazing luck with guitar instructors over the years. My original foray into studying music was the forced piano lessons I had to take as a child. I can still remember the impatient nun that would smash my fingers into the correct hand positions on the keyboard. She would lose her patience all too quickly and had me, an 8 year old boy, wondering why this person hated me so much. Finally, I was allowed to stop piano as I picked up more extracurricular activities and thought that maybe music just wasn’t for me.
When I was 12 years old, a friend had me over to his house where I noticed his brightly colored electric guitars leaning on his closet door. He asked me “Hey, wanna learn an easy guitar song?” and proceeded to show me how to play the intro to Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”. It only consisted of playing open strings (no left hand) and actually sounded just like the real thing. My brain lit up with an awareness about what was technically happening whenever someone played a guitar. The strings would vibrate and create a note depending on how much length was vibrating. An “open” string just meant the string was playing at it’s longest length without any fingers pushing down. “Wow, guitar is cool” I thought. I went on with my life and never really gave it much thought after that first encounter.
Less than a few years later a similar incident happened at a friends house. This time his dad picked up a guitar they had lying around a plucked out “Riders in the Sky” and asked if I wanted to learn how to play it. He showed me how this simple song could be played on the first few frets only using 4 different strings. My brain lit up again with an awareness of how cool, physically, this was for an instrument. Luckily, it stuck with me this time and coincided with my receiving an electric guitar for Christmas.
I fell down the rabbit hole quickly and within a few years was taking multiple weekly guitar lessons. Some focused on specific guitar styles (jazz, classical) and some were more general or one-offs with amazing players I had seen perform. When I started teaching my own students, I kept the enthusiasm set to “10” in my approach. All levels of this instrument had something fun to play with. You could be performing a challenging classical song or just learning a Weezer riff and there was something that felt really exciting when it clicked. A revelation that this is indeed something you can do and, with a little bit pf practice and patience, maybe actually be good at :-)
