Nick V  
Instruments: Guitar
Styles: Pop, Rock, Blues, Folk, Latin, Funk, Hip Hop, Electronic, Reggae, Latin Jazz, Soul, Punk, Avant-garde

I started teaching lessons when I was 16 working for a music day camp in Bellevue, WA. I loved working with young kids who liked rock music and had heart when it came to their love of music. My mom has been a teacher my whole life, and I believe in people passing on knowledge and experiences to each other to help people grow and discover the world.  I think my strongsuit would be in teaching players closer to the beginning of their playing journey, as that was the most formative time for me and when I had the strongest teacher influence in my life. Most of my philosphies would best work from a beginning player's perspective.  Having self-taught myself many things I think I can relate to player's who are similarly self-taught, play more intuitively, and haven't had a technical or theoretical background to a huge degree. I think I can help a lot with getting people out of the boxes they create for themselves in playing as that's my biggest goal as of late. And I definitely see music as being a hugely sacred and spiritual act that humans have been doing forever, and not just something that's taught in schools and done to win competitions or have careers, so I can relate to people's emotional connections to music and explore that side as well. Being able to express musically is a joy, and so my approach is to foster an engagement with it, and focus on your unique relationship with music, rather than forcing people to follow obligatory structures. More advanced players--my specialty area is improvisation and I think I could be of help for those interested in this area!

First lesson: talk a bit about students' goals or if they don't know, or if they're just trying it out, it's all fine, and we'll go from there. I want to know what kind of music somebody likes and what gets them excited. Favorite songs can be goals for new students, so they can see results pretty early on. I had great teachers that showed me chords for my favorite Beatles and Beach Boy songs and that let me have fun while building up dexterity. As a guitar teacher, I don't emphasize note reading early on, unless that is desired, in which case there's few good books we can work through. But I found learning how to play yankee doodle over and over was a lot more tedious and frustrating, then getting that initial feeling of "I can play a song! This is what it feels like to play music!" that I got from learning songs early on. My guitar teacher had some great ways of introducing scales that I can pass along too, for those are interested in solos. I am really interested in improvistion and so for those who want to be a lead guitar player, I have lots to share in those areas.  Essentially, I try go by the student, and give lessons that will make someone push throught the challenging bits because it will be worth it for them. I want you to discover what's fun about music to you! Advanced players: more in depth talks, jamming together, and sharing ideas and philosophies. I have some excellent and sort of out of the box practice strategies that I learned from taking a few lessons with Julian Lage (which I hope to do more of, and pass along anything else that I learn). I am certainly not a theory master general, but if you want to talk about feel, improv, how emotion relates to music and look at things from a fresh perspective I think I could help out loads.