Atlee Gillette Guitar Lessons

My teaching approach:

I tend to break lessons up into information days, where I lay the down the heavy, and jam days, where we have a little fun, and work on your musicianship. If I persuade you to buy new gear I will teach you how to set up and care for it. My working guitar is a Standard Telecaster that gave a matte finish and put in some vintage Lindy Fralin's. I have two Stratocasters, a semi hollow jazz box, an acoustic and a P Bass that I can bring for students to use. I gig with a Fender Deville, but when traveling out for lessons I bring a Rolland Micro Cube and a loop station to practice improv and scales.

My influences are:

My greatest influence would be my own guitar teacher, the late great Mitch Faber, one of the meanest guitar players I've ever heard. Jeff Beck, Pat Metheny, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Stern and John Scofield are monumental guitar players to my development. Jaco Pastorius, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Tal wilkenfeld, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Jan Hammer

My guitar lessons take place in:

The teacher's studio or the student's home

Guitar Lessons with me take place in the following areas:

I teach the stretch between Sacramento and Grass Valley.

Guitar Techniques:

Guidance In Equipment Selection, Recording and Production, Song Writing, Scales and Exercises, Music Theory, Performance, Improvisation, Jamming Skills, Reading Music, Lead guitar, Rhythm guitar

Your first guitar lesson with me might include the following:

First lesson is free. I ask you a bunch of questions to assess your background as a musician. To test the waters I like to show my students a jazz chord, D minor 9, in its most basic form and a basic arpeggio of that chord. If you can get those under your fingers, I have a good understanding of where you are. If you can't get those down, that's okay, we move on to something that you can do and have fun with (usually all the chords of G major).

A guitar lesson with me might entail the following:

I like to ask you what you want to learn right off the bat. If you give me an answer, that's what we work on. I will give you the tools to play the licks, comp in the rhythm section and solo over the chords. if you don't know what you want to learn I generally teach you some new chords, theory, or pull a song out that I think you might like and we learn it. After we've had a few lessons I start to develop a lesson plan for your musical growth.

The qualities I look for in an ideal guitar student might include the following:

One who wants to learn guitar and is passionate about it. Haha, and one that ACTUALLY DOES the homework that I give them. Students of all ages, as long as they don't have an attitude.