#012: Finding Balance for the Modern Guitar Player with Steve Allsworth

Here’s your chance to get advice and tips for learning, working, and teaching music directly from an experienced and modern guitar player, teacher, tour musician, and now, author – Steve Allsworth. In this interview, he shares his journey, his background, and how he dreamed up his book project into reality, The 100 Essential Funk Grooves for Guitar. If you are a guitar player or teacher, Steve shares his experiences that you can definitely learn from and be inspired by in this episode.

His journey as a guitar player, teacher, tour musician, and author.
Helping students to become musicians.
His experience in dealing with “cream of the crop” students.
Steve tells us more about his book, The 100 Essential Funk Grooves for Guitar.
Steve shares how he got the book project started.
Landing a position as a magazine columnist.
Other things he’s been doing in the field of music.
Balancing working and teaching at the same time.
How he was able to teach in reputable music schools.
Advice for players who are thinking of going to university.
Tips for modern guitar players who think field theory is going to stifle them or somehow make them play a certain way.
Steve imparts his learnings from the mistakes he’s made along the way.
One final piece of wisdom that Steve wants to impart on guitar players and guitar teachers.

Guest Links

Guitar Teaching Resources Mentioned

Free Guitar E-book Resources

Today’s Guest

Steve has been a professional guitarist and passionate educator for over 20 years. He has published over 200 articles and nearly 1,000 transcriptions for the UK’s best-selling guitar magazine, Total Guitar, and its sister magazines, Guitar Techniques and Guitar World. He has also written for Total Accuracy, RGT, and Rockschool. Steve has just published his first guitar book ‘100 Essential Funk Grooves for Guitar’. Along the way, Steve has interviewed many of the great gunslingers from Marty Friedman and Joe Satriani to Steve Vai. Although his run-in with the late, great Dimebag Darrell will forever go down in infamy.

He has also toured with Ronan Keating, Lily Allen, and Mica Paris. He also had a past life as a sideman with various stints on TV, radio, and sessions with the likes of Westlife, LeAnn Rimes, Rod Stewart, Alicia Keys, Max Gilkes (Lily Allen), Nayo and Kitayah (Andy Gangadeen). Steve has been spreading his guitar knowledge for over two decades, first as a peripatetic tutor in Cambridge, then as a lecturer at the ACM in Guildford, becoming head of guitar at the BIMM Institute Brighton in 2004 and later head of live performance at the BIMM Institute London in 2014. He also teaches from his private practice ‘Tiny Monkey Studios’ and has plans to bring his knowledge online via YouTube and his website steveallsworth.com

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