With Key To Music

I’m the director of Key To Music, and I founded it to share my passion for music. I set up a music education service in London in 2005 before relocating to Edinburgh and founding another, and it gives me huge satisfaction to see the students I began teaching when they were not yet in their teens now performing their own compositions in pubs and clubs a few years later. I teach guitar, singing and composition.

My approach to teaching can be distilled to three key ideas: firstly, a student needs to feel comfortable in their environment in order to learn most effectively and express themselves most freely. Secondly, new information or skills become embedded and mastered most effectively when they are actively applied. Thirdly, music is composite of many different skills and aptitudes, and these all need to be developed in tandem in order to be able to express yourself musically.

A traditional model of tuition whereby a student learns some new content, reviews it in the next lesson and then gets more content works for some types of student but not everybody, and can result in an unbalanced skill set, where a student is able to play some pieces but has no real understanding of how use and combine musical elements themselves. I address this by presenting content in such a way that students are apply to use new information in various different musical contexts and integrate it into what they are already able to do.