January 16, 2026 

January 16, 2026 

First Principles

This article is aimed at a very specific audience- that is, guys who play guitar and want to get better at it. There are a lot of guys like us! If that’s you too, well, you’re in my tribe because that’s what I like to do too. 

But here’s the thing. The guy that I’m talking about in my audience wants to get better but he’s not exactly sure how to do that. He keeps going back, over and over to the same stuff that he already knows. He knows it really well! Man, does he know it well! But he’d like to try something different. 

Maybe he’s looking at online video or a guitar lesson program or an online teacher or an in-person teacher… but it’s hard to find a good fit. That might be because half of the fun of playing guitar is teaching yourself how to play a tune!  And sorry  -being told how to do something is not the same as figuring it out for yourself. Teaching yourself how to play is the best, and you know what? I can help you figure out how to do that.

As a guitar student myself, I always thought that was one of the most interesting things about it! I want to figure stuff out for myself, I don’t want to be told how to play something interesting…. truth is, I want to already know how to play something interesting. So if that’s you too, I get it. 

My task as a guitar teacher is pretty straightforward; take what I know and present it in a way that a student can understand. I know how to “think like a musician”. How to accompany oneself. How to practice in a disciplined way, how to encourage oneself by taking smaller bites, choosing goals that are challenging but attainable…  all the things you’d want to know if you’re serious about guitar… And I can show you how to do all that for yourself. 

I have quite a lot of experience teaching guitar but I’m also an artist; a formally trained illustrator, back in the day.
Here are a couple of examples, in case you’re interested.

I’m still an artist! My art these days though, is teaching people how to play guitar. 

It is amazing and delightful for me! Every single head is different, and, provided the student and I share a genuine desire to learn to play guitar better than we do now, every student is teachable. My “art” as a guitar teacher, if you will, is figuring out how to present the knowledge that I have in a way that each student can understand. That’s the interesting part! I teach the same thing to students from 7 to 70. The coolest thing for me is figuring out the best way to do that for each student.

There are a couple of fundamental truths that we must discover together about making music on guitar- “first principles”, if you will. I’ve proved them out to myself so many times I don’t think about them anymore… except, of course, when I’m trying to show them to somebody else. Then I think about them quite a lot, and what might be the best way to explain them to the unique person that I’m talking to. That’s the fascinating part, to me; how to get to the point where we actually “converse”, musically.

First Principles

I think what it comes down to is having a “shared language”. It’s useful to have a couple of simple, fundamental ideas that we understand in the same way. If we have a common language and share some ideas about what things are, we can discuss them more easily! We can begin to understand the nature of music played on guitar and how to use that knowledge for our own music. 

Know the names and numbers of your strings. That is job one.

I don’t care how good a guitar player you are and believe me, I’ve known some good ones who don’t know this: there’s no way around knowing the string names and numbers. There are only six in total, and two of them have the same name. One of those two is fat and one is skinny. 1 is skinny, 6 is fat, everybody else is somewhere  in-between. 

I use a mnemonic device for the names: Eddie Ate Dynamite, GoodBye Eddie. I’d ask you to think of that not just as a string of words but as a picture in your head; a cartoon guy named Eddie runs into a little trouble with a stick of dynamite. Make it into a little animated story. Think about it, visualize it. Knowing the names and the numbers of your strings, that’s crucial, and the beginning of our common language about guitar playing. E6, A5, D4, G3, B2, E1; that is a pillar of knowledge you can count on. More to come.