Lessons are shaped around your experience, goals and repertoire, with clear guidance on technique, musicianship and effective practice.
We teach beginners, returning players and experienced guitarists, with lessons taking place in our Derby studio and online.
Lessons help identify areas for improvement and pick up on problems before they become serious, debilitating habits. Tuition provides the best solutions to ensure you stay on the right path. Your practice reinforces these better habits until they become your default approach to playing the guitar. When these two work in harmony, progress is guaranteed.
We are all unique and there is no singular blueprint that can teach us how to play the guitar. CGA provides a personalised roadmap to success based on your natural approach to the guitar, established physical skill sets, current musical understanding, previous musical experience and your specific musical goals.
Classical guitar brings together a wide range of technical and musical concepts, many of which can be difficult to understand from explanation alone. Tuition breaks these ideas down into clear, manageable principles, demonstrates how they work in practice and relates them directly to your own playing. What once seemed complicated becomes something you can understand, apply and eventually recognise for yourself.
Progress depends on more than knowing what to practise — you also need the motivation to keep doing it. Regular tuition creates momentum through achievable goals, fresh challenges, new repertoire and the satisfaction of recognising your own improvement. Just as importantly, working with an experienced musician provides a continuing source of ideas and inspiration, helping to keep the guitar rewarding enough to return to day after day.
“Lessons with CGA have left me a confident and skilled guitar player.”
An experienced outside ear can identify things that are extremely difficult to judge from behind the guitar — in technique, sound, timing, balance, interpretation and the way a passage is being approached.
The aim is not simply to be told what to change. Understanding the musical or technical reason behind a problem makes the solution more useful — and more transferable to the rest of your playing.
A lesson should leave you with something concrete: what to practise, what to listen for, how to approach it and why that work matters.
The aim is not simply to get through more pieces. Good tuition gradually changes the way you listen, practise and solve problems for yourself.
Understand what the work is trying to achieve.
Develop a better awareness of sound, balance, timing and musical detail.
Rather than repeating passages and hoping they improve.
In phrasing, interpretation and technique.
Carry what you learn in a lesson into repertoire you explore for yourself.
Classical guitar isn't simply one style amongst many at CGA. It is the instrument around which the Academy was built.
Ed Peczek trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and has spent more than two decades teaching classical guitar, working with players from their first serious lessons through to advanced repertoire and further musical study.
That experience matters most in the lesson itself: listening carefully, identifying what is holding the playing back and finding a useful way forward.
Bring what you are working on. It can be polished, unfinished or somewhere in between. The purpose of the lesson is to find the most useful work to do next.
Play something you are currently working on, or bring a technical or musical problem you would like to explore.
We identify the details that matter most rather than trying to change everything at once.
That might involve technique, practice method, sound, interpretation, fingering, musical understanding or a combination of them.
Finish the lesson knowing what to work on next, what to listen for and how to approach it when you practise alone.
One-to-one tuition at the private CGA studio in Derby, with the immediacy and detail of working together in the same room.
Explore Studio TuitionThe same one-to-one teaching approach delivered online — ideal for players outside Derby, elsewhere in the UK or further afield.
Explore Online Tuition“The lessons are well structured, with exercises to improve my technique, well chosen pieces of music for my ability…”
Not sure which length to choose? Ask before booking and we can point you in the right direction.
Useful for younger pupils, tightly defined work or shorter regular sessions.
£22 per lessonBook a LessonEnough time to work in detail while keeping the lesson focused.
£32 per lessonBook a LessonMore space for repertoire, technique, interpretation and broader musical work in the same session.
£42 per lessonBook a LessonThere is no audition and no expectation that you arrive with something perfectly prepared. Your first lesson is an opportunity to hear where your playing is now, understand what you want from the instrument and begin identifying the work that will be most useful.
Bring something you are currently playing, a piece you would like help with, or simply the questions that brought you to the lesson.
Discuss what you want from your playing and anything that currently feels difficult, unclear or frustrating.
Use the lesson itself to address something useful rather than spending the whole session talking about future plans.
Finish with clear priorities for the work between lessons.
Yes. Lessons can begin from the fundamentals and develop technique, reading, musicianship and repertoire together rather than expecting you to arrive with prior classical training.
That is entirely fine. We start from the player you are now rather than the player you feel you ought to be. Previous experience usually gives us useful material to build on.
Not necessarily at the outset. Where reading needs development, it can become part of the work rather than a barrier to beginning.
For many players, yes. Good online tuition still allows detailed work on technique, sound, interpretation, practice method and repertoire. If a particular issue is better suited to working in person, we can say so.
It depends on age, experience and what you want to work on. If you are unsure, ask before booking and we can recommend an appropriate starting point.
