Tring · Berkhamsted · Aylesbury · Online
Rock, pop and blues lessons for complete beginners, young players and adults coming back to it after twenty years in the loft. In person across Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, or online anywhere.
Who I teach
Most guitar teaching is aimed at one of them and quietly hopes the other two will cope. I have spent long enough in classrooms and on stages to teach all three properly.
You have never held one, or you have owned one for four years and can play half of Smoke on the Water. We start from where you actually are, not where a book assumes you are.
Ages seven and up. Grades if you want them, band skills if you would rather. I spent sixteen years getting young musicians onto real stages, and that is still the point.
You can already play a bit and you are tired of plateauing. Phrasing, timing, theory that is actually useful, and how to sound like yourself rather than a tutorial.
How the lessons work
Every lesson is built around music you actually want to play. Underneath that, we work on the things that stop most people improving: timing, left hand economy, hearing chord movement, and knowing why a bend lands where it does.
Electric or acoustic, both are fine. I will help you choose gear without spending money you do not need to spend, and I will show you what to practise between lessons so the week in between counts for something.
If grades are the goal, we follow the Trinity Rock & Pop syllabus. If they are not, we never mention them again.
Prices
Lessons are bought in blocks, paid before the first lesson of the block. Your first block is three lessons, at exactly the same rate as any other, so you are not committing to half a term before you know whether we get on. After that it is blocks of six.
Blocks exist for one reason. Six lessons in a row will do more for you than six lessons scattered across a year, and it is not close. I taught myself guitar, without lessons and without much structure, and it took me far longer than it needed to. Paying upfront is not a sales tactic, it is the thing that keeps people turning up in week four when the novelty has worn off and their fingers hurt.
Within about 25 minutes of Tring
Roughly a twenty five minute drive from Tring, which covers Aylesbury, Berkhamsted, Hemel Hempstead, Leighton Buzzard, Chesham, Dunstable and Amersham, across Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. Half hour slots are for under nines, who rarely last longer than that at the start, and are priced to cover the trip. Everyone else, forty five minutes minimum. Further out is possible, just ask.
Anywhere
Proper audio, two camera angles and shared tab on screen. Not a phone propped against a mug.
Getting started
No guitar required. We talk about what you want to play, what you have tried before, and whether I am the right teacher for it. If I am not, I will tell you and point you somewhere better.
Book the callTrinity Rock & Pop
I teach the Trinity Rock & Pop guitar syllabus, Initial through to Grade 8. It is built entirely on real songs by real bands rather than classical repertoire, which means the exam material is music students actually want to learn.
Nobody has to take an exam. Plenty of my students never sit one, and the syllabus is just as useful as a map: it tells us what to learn next and stops lessons drifting. If you do want the certificate, it is there, and I will get you ready for it. Both are fine. It is worth saying out loud because a lot of people assume grades are compulsory and are quietly put off.
The techniques that begin appearing at each stage, taken from Trinity's own guidance on what an own-choice song should contain. Everything is cumulative, and no one song contains all of it. The full syllabus is on the Trinity site.
If you do want an exam
Trinity Rock & Pop exams are built around playing songs, not scales. There is one exam at each grade and it is the same shape all the way up: three songs. One from the Trinity songbook, one technical focus song that concentrates on two specific skills, and one that is entirely your choice, which can be something you have written yourself or a cover you have arranged.
There are no scales to recite, no sight reading and no theory questions. The remaining marks go on session skills, where you either play back a short phrase you have not heard before, or improvise over a backing track. You choose which.
You can sit it face to face with an examiner, or digitally, by filming the performance at home and sending it in. Digital exams have no separate session skills test; those skills are judged across the three songs instead. Filming it at home until you are happy with the take is a very different proposition from walking into an exam room.
Read the Trinity syllabus
About Nick
I started on the trumpet at seven, which is the same age as my youngest students, and picked up a guitar at about ten because my big brother played one and I wanted to be like him. That, and I liked loud things. Not sophisticated reasons. They are the reasons most people start, though, and they work perfectly well.
I had proper lessons on the trumpet. On the guitar I taught myself, with whatever my brother was willing to show me. I got there in the end, but I then spent years unlearning things I had taught myself wrong, which is slower and far more annoying than learning them properly the first time. I have always wished I had been taught from the start. That is most of why I do this now.
Thirty years of it have been professional. I signed to A&M Records and Rondor Publishing with the rock band Stone Bird, touring the UK and Europe with Motörhead, UFO and Saxon. Session and live work followed, with artists including Gabrielle, Nelly Furtado and Stacie Orrico, and music I have written has been used by the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the Discovery Channel.
Alongside all that I spent sixteen years at Morpeth School in East London running the music, art and drama programme. It won Music Department of the Year at the Education Business Awards in 2015. I managed eighteen instrumental teachers, put students on stages at the Barbican and the O2, and learned how to teach people rather than just play at them.
I still play. That matters, because the things worth teaching are the things you only learn from doing the job.
The practical bits
For parents
I hold an enhanced DBS check including the children's barred list, issued in July 2026 and registered with the DBS Update Service, which means you can confirm online that it is still clear rather than taking my word for it. I am safeguarding trained. I spent sixteen years working in a secondary school, so none of this is new territory.
I teach in your home, not mine. For any student under 18 that means a parent or carer needs to be in the house for the whole lesson, and you are very welcome to sit in on it. I will not teach a child alone in a house with no other adult present. Online lessons for under 18s are booked through a parent or carer, who is welcome to be in the room throughout.
If you would like to see my DBS certificate or insurance documents before booking, just ask. I would rather you did.
Students on stage
Scales in a bedroom are a means, not an end. Wherever I can, I get students playing alongside other musicians, because nothing accelerates a player like a real gig with real stakes.
The Pepper Show, October 2025
Get in touch
Tell me a bit about who the lessons are for and what you want to get out of them. I answer everything myself, usually within a day.