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[Matt]

Hello everyone,

My name is Matt, I am from Maidstone in the South East of the UK.

I’m 41 and have been playing and learning with purpose for nearly 2 years now.

I had picked up and put down the guitar many times over the past 20 years, never getting past basic chords, getting frustrated and bored and giving up.

In the autumn of 2020 I got myself a guitar teacher and actually started to learn properly. The last 20 months has been brilliant. I’ve picked up so much and really started to understand the guitar and music so much better.

I took my Grade 1 Electric guitar exam and got a distinction in March of this year (It seems odd that an instrument so associated with freedom of expression and improvisation can be ‘examined’ but there you go.) It was really useful to learn some new scales and chords and thankfully the improvisation I had to do was patter 1 of A Minor Pentatonic so I got full marks there 🙂

My blues influences are Clapton, Peter Green, Gary Moore, the Kings and then the old blues guys like Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Sonny Terry, Lightin’ Hopkins. My dad found this album called ‘The Mike Raven Blues Sampler’ many years ago, he was a British radio DJ who put out this LP with old blues records and a bit of commentary about each track, it blew my mind!

My other influences come from rock ‘n’ roll originally, I saw this concert on the telly when I was really young called Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session – Carl Perkins and Friends, the friends were Ringo Starr, Dave Edmunds, George Harrison, Roseanne Cash and Eric Clapton, that blew my tiny little mind as well. My mum and dad used to have the radio or an LP or CD on all the time, I grew up surrounded by music, a lot of rock ‘n’ roll, blues, rock and a ton of country too.

Unfortunately it took me 40 years to pick up the guitar and try to learn some of the stuff I’d been listening to, but I’m here now and loving it.

Thanks to Aidan and the team for all the courses and content, it’s so good having this stuff available and in such detail, the combination of in-person lessons and this site has accelerates my playing over the past few months.

Looking forward to hanging out here and learning more.

Matt