Sherwin - Guitar tutor - New York
1st lesson free
Sherwin - Guitar tutor - New York

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Sherwin

  • Rate $65
  • Response 1h
Sherwin - Guitar tutor - New York

$65/hr

1st lesson free

Contact

1st lesson free

1st lesson free

  • Guitar
  • Electric guitar
  • Bass guitar
  • Ukulele

Guitar Lessons with Sherwin for Everyone, From First Chords to Confident Playing

  • Guitar
  • Electric guitar
  • Bass guitar
  • Ukulele

Lesson location

About Sherwin

About me

I think of the guitar as a place where most problems come from two things the hand has not yet learned to tell apart: a clean note and a buzzing one, a relaxed fretting hand and a squeezing one, a chord that rings and a chord that is only almost there. So I usually start a lesson by putting two things side by side and asking you to notice the difference. Play the chord, lift one finger, and tell me which string went dead. A child who has just found her first chord and an adult coming back to the instrument after a long break can both answer that question on the first day, and the answer tells me where to begin. Once you can hear or feel the difference, the fix often takes minutes rather than weeks, because you are no longer guessing.

In my lessons I watch the picking hand more than the fretting hand at first, because the right hand sets the tone of everything else. I look at whether the pick meets the string at the same angle on every stroke, whether the wrist locks up when the riff speeds up, and whether you stop breathing when a change is coming. You may say a chord change is slow, but I rarely ask you to practice the change itself. I ask you to play the open strings, then the first shape, then the second, and to lift away from each one and come back, so we can see whether the trouble is in the shapes or in the space between them. Very often it is the space. If one explanation does not land, I change the way I show it: I might play the riff for you on a single string, hum the line so you hear where the phrase breathes, or ask you to tap the rhythm on the body of the guitar while your fingers rest. For a beginner I may keep everything on one string with a metronome slow enough to hear every note arrive. For a teenager working through a song they love, I might record a short phone clip of both hands and we watch it together at the end of the lesson, the way a sports coach reviews film.

Some of the most useful work happens with specific, small problems. If you have a barre chord that buzzes, I break it into two physical actions: first set the bony edge of the index finger just behind the fret so the notes ring, then bring the thumb in behind the neck to add the pressure, rather than squeezing everything at once. If a passage falls apart when you increase the tempo, the three notes that collapse are usually held up by one finger that drags or lifts too early, so I have you keep that finger down as a pivot while the others move, and we gradually release the pivot until the whole shape moves as one. For soloing, I like limitation. You might improvise for two minutes using only the top two strings, or only the notes of one position on the neck, and then we add a third string. The restriction forces you to make deliberate choices about where a phrase starts and ends, which is the part of improvisation that most players skip. With a more advanced student working on a difficult piece, I often reduce the piece to its skeleton, meaning the notes that land on the strong beats and the harmony underneath them, play only that, and then rebuild the ornaments around it. Once the structure is secure, the decorative notes stop feeling like a threat.

What I most want you to leave with is the ability to diagnose your own playing. When something breaks, I ask you to find the exact place it breaks: the first note, the change, or the last bar of the phrase. Then we change only one variable at a time, whether that is the tempo, the rhythm, or the string you play on, so you can see what the change actually did. I also practice rhythm separately from fretting, because a riff that is wrong rhythmically will never sound right however carefully the fingers move. I do not want you to leave a lesson only able to play what we rehearsed together. I would rather hear, a few months from now, that you have taught yourself a song you chose on your own, and that you knew where to slow down when it stopped working.

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  • English

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English

Most of the frustration I hear about on guitar comes from trying to move the whole hand at once. So in my lessons, the first question is always which finger actually has to travel and which can stay put. I teach the idea of an anchor: one finger that stays planted while the others move. If you are working on your first G, C and D, you may find the change from C to G suddenly smooth once you notice your middle finger can slide up a fret instead of lifting off and landing again. Later, the same idea turns up in a barre chord, where the index finger does the anchoring, or in a jazz voicing where the thumb behind the neck holds the shape steady. Whatever your level, a chord change stops being a leap and becomes a small number of deliberate movements, and that is the change you can actually feel and repeat.

You can play a passage slowly, but the moment you speed up, the same three notes collapse. When that happens, I don't want you to repeat the whole piece until it feels better. I want to find the exact moment it breaks. Often it is one transition: a pull-off from the seventh fret to the fifth, or a stretch that only fails when the fretting finger has to lift before the next note lands. We isolate that transition alone, then loop just the two notes with a finger motion that you practise as two smaller actions, first the fretting, then the release, until each one is automatic. Only after that do we add the note before and the note after. A beginner might do the same thing with a single down-up strum pattern on one chord, while a returning student might take a song they used to play and rebuild its hardest bar in exactly this way.

Timing and pitch are separate problems, and treating them as one is why many students get stuck. So sometimes I have you play the rhythm of a riff on a single string, or with the left hand lightly dampening the strings so that you only hear the pick attack. That exposes coordination problems in the picking hand without the distraction of finding the right frets. I also like comparing two picking approaches side by side: a rest stroke, where the pick lands on the next string and stops, against a free stroke, where it passes through. You play the same passage both ways and notice which gives you even volume and which tires your forearm. Children tend to enjoy this as a sort of game, a contest between two sounds, while teenagers often respond well to taking a riff from a song they already love and reducing it to its skeleton before rebuilding it.

What I most want is for you to stop needing me to tell you where you are. Instead of memorising the whole neck, I teach you to find landmarks: the fret where a chord shape repeats, the open string that gives you the root, the bend that always lands on the same pitch. Once you can name where you are, you can practise alone with confidence. Improvisation works the same way. I often set a limit, such as one pentatonic position, only two strings, or only quarter notes, because restriction forces you to make deliberate musical choices instead of running up and down the fretboard on autopilot. Over time, the goal is that you can hear what a passage needs, find it on the guitar, and know what to listen for when something goes wrong.

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Rate

  • $65

Pack prices

  • 5h: $325
  • 10h: $650

free lessons

The first lesson with Sherwin will allow you to get to know each other and discuss your needs for future lessons.

  • 1hr

online

  • $65/h

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