Fall 2008: Accepting new Private fiddle students of all abilities (absolute beginner thru advanced). New Group classes forming for fall--Group Beginner, Group Intermediate.
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These are the styles I'm comfortable teaching: Bluegrass, Missouri-style old-time, general old-time (with a mix of cross-tuning), and Greengrass (which is a hybridized style including all the above listed styles with a suggestive hint of Irish).
I've always enjoyed teaching fiddle to enthusiastic students. You have to really want to learn. I play by ear, therefore, I teach by ear. This has its benefits and its limitations. I work with students from numerous backgrounds -- from beginners to advanced, from classically trained to self-taught, from child to adult (currently my youngest student is 8 and my oldest student is 77).
I tend to focus on quality of tunes versus quantity. My job isn't so much to teach you a bunch of tunes, but rather, to help you learn how to play in order for YOU to learn tunes. Huh? In other words, by leaning some fundamentals from the ground up, and by learning to really listen to what you're doing and how you're playing, we continue to refine our ability to play from the heart. In a sense, my main goal is to help you build up your tool chest of techniques and approaches that will work for you, and then you will better understand how to play many fiddle tunes with your own voice. I feel strongly that playing fiddle is as much a discipline of the mind as it is a discipline of the hands and that philosphy is at the core of my teaching.