Acoustic Guitar Lessons
Nassau Bay Music Lessons offers private acoustic guitar lessons in Clear Lake Texas, with Edward or Alicia Motter-Vlahakos, as well as our associate Brian Berlin. Ed has been teaching acoustic guitar for over 20 years, focusing on both musical literacy (notation reading, music theory, etc) and a linguistic approach to improvisation and ear training, in styles ranging from traditional, folk, rock, jazz, classical, and ethic . Alicia holds a bachelors of music education from the University of Houston, has been an avid lover of the steel string acoustic guitar since age fifteen, both teaching and performing in Houston for over 20 years.
There are many fascinating reasons to take acoustic guitar lessons with us in Clear Lake, Texas! While teaching guitar, or indeed any instrumental or vocal lessons in our studio, we invite students to consider the historic significance of the composers, performers, and the story of how the instrument itself came into being. While the guitar’s heyday of the past hundred years firmly places it in the running for “most significant instrument of the twentieth century”, it is quite a bit older than that. What we now call the acoustic guitar is the culmination of centuries of instrument technological development with a rich cultural heritage stretching back thousands of years and across continents. The ancient Sanskrit word for string, “tar”, can be found in the name of many early and modern instruments which share a common ancestry with the modern guitar. The dotar, two-string instrument found in Turkestan, the Persian setar, and the Indian sitar are all descended from common forebears, and contain similar elements to modern acoustic guitars. A long flat neck, metal strings, frets, and a complex internal bracing system are components shared between all of these disparate instruments. Even though the lute and oud bear a passing resemblance to acoustic guitars, those instruments brought across the Mediterranean to Spain by Moorish invaders in the 3rd century are only distant relatives derived from a different branch of musical development.