We Do Adventure

I love helping people to creative firsts; I don’t particularly enjoy spending money. When I do spend I want to know it’s been money well spent. A couple of months back I started e-begging for guitars . It was fantastic when we started to see donations coming in. But then came the responsibility to see that cash was well invested. After talking with some of my students I decided we needed to get an electric guitar and amp, along with new acoustic guitars. I’m going to claim that was a very inspired move on my part! You can see the guitar pictured here, being played by one of our students during a concert at his school. He had two spots on the bill. The other spot, which I tragically forgot to photograph, had him playing guitar while a fellow student recited a poem. Together they recently won a generous cash prize with their creation, coming first in a talent show for high school students across the canton. As one of their teachers excitedly explained, it was the first time anyone one fr...

I’ve been helping people to learn guitar for the better part of ten years. If I had a pound for every time I’ve been asked to play that riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana’s generation-defining greatest hit – then I’d be able to bail out investors fallen on hard times since Mr Madoff made off with their money! Like a Ponzi scheme, it’s not a song I view as big or clever; although, as with the best blags, you have to marvel that they’ve got away with it for so long and impressed so many sane people along the way. Tonight I was meeting with a student to play guitar. Over the past few months we’ve established that his taste lies in latin and jazz – not genres I'm particularly strong in. I like to pigeon-hole myself as a devotee of melodic pop-rock, partly because it’s so desperately uncool but also because that really is the music I enjoy. However, I don’t believe teaching should be used for musical indoctrination so I’m not going to teach what I like, rather help people to pl...