Information About Tim - Sheffield teacher

Personal Description:

I am a professional musician (mainly jazz and folk), university music lecturer, and a PhD researcher in ethnomusicology. I am passionate about a wide range of different forms of music, and this is reflected in my unusual breadth of experience as both a performer and a teacher.

Tutoring Experience:

I began teaching private guitar lessons during my undergraduate degree, and subsequently taught a range of different stringed instruments, and music theory, for two different music schools (the former in the Northeast, and the latter in Sheffield). In the latter of these roles alone I taught well over 10,000 individual and group lessons to students of all ages and abilities. In addition to my instrumental teaching, I have been a lecturer at the University of Sheffield Department of Music since 2016, delivering classes and workshops on the context, theory, and performance of popular and traditional musics.

Tutoring Approach:

Learning is necessarily an active process, so it is essential to build lessons around the interests and aspirations of each individual student. The specific skills it will be important to develop depend on the style of the music the student is wanting to learn (e.g. sight-reading will be more important to classical guitarists, and ear training more important to folk musicians). Whatever style of music we are working on, I always encourage musicians to take a holistic approach: to draw connections between their instrumental technique, theoretical understanding, and aural comprehension.