Experienced tutor in Guitar in Santa Monica, Scott offers private lessons tailored to your needs.

Scott’s daughter was in my first grade class, so at the beginning of the school year I asked him if he could come in every Friday morning for the entire school year and teach music. Scott’s idea was to do so via a songwriting exercise. He would ask the kids to write a song with him about the weekly theme through which we explored all of our daily disciplines. At the end of the class, we would have 15 minutes of playing instruments and dancing to simple old rock’n’roll songs like Hound Dog and High Heeled Sneakers.

At the end of the year, we had about 13 very good songs which Scott recorded with the children in a marathon day of performance and made copies for each of the students and their families, who were thrilled by the performances and having the keepsake recording. Scott did a wonderful job of helping the children explore their word and conceptual skills by asking very good prompting questions and carefully coaching them so the ideas seemed like theirs, even though he helped out quite a bit on some occasions with the lyrics. All-in-all, a fantastic experience for me as well as the students.

Scott taught all three of my sons guitar and did an excellent job of adjusting his instructions to three very different learning capacities and attention spans. Scott doubled as an electric bass teacher with my most enthusiastic child and was extremely patient with my youngest. Scott came prepared with different lessons for all three and the boys looked forward to his sessions with them. I especially appreciated the way Scott included music theory tips as part of the learning process and his easy going personality.

I had been a so-so guitar player for many years, as singing is my main focus, but I needed to ramp up my guitar skills to accompany myself and lead a band I started to perform my songs. Scott made all our lessons interesting and was able to take my rudimentary skills to whole other level by explaining how to play more meaningfully with specific rhythms in my right hand, as well as using the pentatonic scales for single note solos. Scott is steeped in many of the blues styles, which appeal to me a lot, so I learned more from him that regard and how to apply some of those stylistic tricks to any song I wrote, blues or not. Our lessons were fun and enlightening, so much so that we became very good friends and play music together frequently.

Scott is a very thoughtful teacher. He is patient and makes the learning process fun. With him, I feel I’m making progress pretty quickly, which is good because in the past learning guitar seemed like it would take forever and a pretty daunting task. He’s a great guy and teaching is definitely his thing.