Tariff

I charge £39.50 per hour's guitar lesson. This is based of the Musicians' Union recommended rate for tuition, plus a pound extra to cover the various software subscriptions I need to facilitate my services.

The fee includes:

  • 24/7 access to my library of online content on Notion (unless the platform goes down for whatever reason!)
  • Access to a weekly live-streamed Q&A.
  • Access to the community chat.

(Read more about these extras below).

In terms of how to pay, my students pay for their lessons either on an opt-in (pay as you go) basis, or an opt-out basis whereby they pay by subscription for a regularly recurring lesson time. I'll describe these two models immediately below.

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Pay As You Go

This is the simplest method to pay for your lessons. You simply book and pay for each lesson individually, when you want one. This is ideal if you work shifts for example, and your work timetable differs from week to week so that you can't adhere lessons on a regularly recurring timetable. This is also good if you only want to book a lesson when you feel you've achieved a particular practice benchmark. (Please note however that your access to my online content may be revoked if you've not received a lesson within a three week period).

The only real downside to this method is that it may be difficult to book a convenient time if my schedule is particularly busy.

Pay By Subscription

If you'd like your lesson to recur at a regular interval, e.g. every Tuesday at 13:40, then the best way I've found to facilitate this is to automate each payment to recur on the day of your lesson. I use Stripe as my online payments provider, and it is a simple matter to set up such a subscription after having booked the first lesson under by the Pay As You Go method. All you need to do is mention the preference to me, and I'll create the subscription, so long as the interval between lessons is no longer than two weeks.

Most of my students pay this way. The regularity and impending nature of recurring lessons can serve as a source of accountability and motivation in itself, as well as a regular reminder of the original decision to undertake to learn to play, thus helping people remain loyal to their past selves.

Cancellations: if you need to cancel a lesson for whatever reason, you'll need to notify me no less than 24 hours before the lesson is due to commence, and I will either cancel the respective impending transaction, or refund it (in the instance that I am late to read your communication).

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The Extras

    • Notion
      I use a platform called Notion to create individual student dashboards accessible only to myself and the respective student. These dashboards feature a progress board which presents all material covered in lessons in the light of its fluency status. I also list and update strengths and weaknesses in general. For theory topics, I rely on checklists (having been fully persuaded of their efficacy by the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande). These checklists prevent me from missing a step in imparting to my students a thorough and systematic knowledge of complex subjects. On top of that, there are pages available to all students presenting a diverse variety of subject matter, each containing video demonstrations, tips, and diagrams.
    • Live Streamed Q&A
      It is quite natural in the course of learning the guitar for all sorts of musical questions to begin to haunt you. I am quite fond of taking these questions seriously and answering them fully. But upon reflection, lesson time is not ideal for this. I can easily become long-winded, and an innocently put question can induce me to take a rather epic diversion from my original lesson plan. But often the questions are very good questions, and deserve a proper answer. So, I have resolved instead to host a weekly live-streamed Q&A, accessible to all students, wherein I can fully indulge such questions at leisure.
    • Slack
      Slack does what a Facebook or Watsapp group does: it facilitates a community chat environment. Guitarists are too often a shy, retiring breed, consigning their playing to the bedroom, and making a point of never talking about it. But really, there's no good reason for this skulking disposition. One thing you'll learn from the GFA community on Slack is that your struggles are entirely normal. One of the most common plaints I hear is: "I promise I've practised! I could play this perfectly yesterday!" I believe them. And I think: if only they knew that most people experience this, they wouldn't be so ashamed about it! And my younger students seem to forget that I've been playing guitar longer than they've existed, and so gauge their worth by comparison to me. Which is clearly absurd, but very often they speak to no other guitarists, and imagine that nobody else struggles but them.
      The GFA community on Slack is there to provide sobriety and relief from madness and delusion, but I also hope people simply enjoy themselves there, and are as ready to offer help as to receive it from somebody in the same boat.

Begin the journey today.