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NEW! Lean to play "Blackbird" from my instructional video here.

My name is Bill and I teach guitar in the central Little Rock area. I also teach mandolin and 5-string banjo, but guitar comprises the bulk of my teaching, because it is so much more popular. When compared to banjo, which is pigeonholed as a bluegrass and folk instrument, and mandolin, which is little-known outside bluegrass and baroque circles, the guitar is a very versatile and ubiquitous instrument that crosses many styles. I can’t play them all, but the ones I do, I do pretty well, I think. And, judging by what most of my students have said over the past five years, I think I teach them pretty well, too.

As to the styles I teach, they mostly center around the steel string acoustic guitar. I can start you out on the basic chords, teach you to accompany yourself as you sing, teach you to fingerpick, teach you to flatpick fiddle tunes (a la Doc Watson, Tony Rice, etc.), and teach you to play lead lines with the pick. If you have a nylon string guitar, I can help you with fingerpicking chords and melodies, though I make no claim to be a “classical” guitar teacher. I can take you through basic rock and blues guitar, but you’ll have to go elsewhere for your “shredder” licks. I just play what I play and teach what I play.

I wanted to develop this site to express my personal appreciation for the world's most popular musical instrument, the instrument I started to learn when I was seven and continue to learn 44 years later. Also, it's just me, not a team of players/teachers, like in some of the big instructional sites. But I will have some instructional materials here — tabs, video, helpful hints, pictures of my guitars, and hopefully some pictures of yours as well.

As for the two guitars you see depicted on this page: the acoustic is a 1985 Santa Cruz Brazilian Rosewood Tony Rice Signature model; the electric is a modifed 1965 Gibson SG Junior.

They are the two most valuable guitars I own, so you can see, by collector standards, I don't have much of a collection. But they are all good guitars, and what they lack in intrinsic value they make up for in mileage. I don’t own a pre-war Martin, but if you do, I’ll gladly post pictures of it here.

I still have the Japanese-made Lyle concert size guitar my folks gave me in 1972. I still remember the box it came in ("Crafted for the discriminating musician.") and the smell of the wood when I first took it out and played it. I was a happy little seventh-grader. The Stella that my sister and I had been playing since 1965 had this big honker neck that I couldn't get my hand around. It also was made out of some kind of unidentified plywood. At least the Lyle was spruce and mahogany plywood.

So that’s my story. As is always the case with a Web site, there’s much more to come.