Meet our teachers

LEARN FROM JACOB NOW!
Jacob is a guitar player from Wellington, New Zealand that has been living in South-West Victoria for the past few years teaching guitar, and in his spare time working towards Trelissick Sessions YouTube videos. Jacob has developed a great ear for learning music from recordings or performances, and feels that learning in notation is in tandem beneficial to contextualise how parts are assembled in music. He enjoys analysing music to find out what makes it tick, and applying new music theory concepts in his playing and teaching. Guitar players like John Mayer and Tom Misch are significant influences to Jacob’s playing, but he is still perplexed by how Van Halen manages to sound so fresh. He has experience teaching students of a variety of ages, and enjoys teaching adult learners!

Jacob started to play the guitar in subsidised group classes at the age of 8, where he progressed more with class disruption than the guitar. However, his persevering teachers eventually managed to get through to him, and towards the end of his time at Raroa Music Centre he had developed a bit of an interest in the guitar. Unfortunately the New Zealand government’s generosity for subsidised music lessons extended only so far as to the end of year 8, which saw Jacob spinning his wheels for a couple years teaching himself the guitar off Ultimate Guitar Tabs...

Jacob’s fervour for the guitar was realised by his parents after he financed his own electric guitar from babysitting money. Lessons were then arranged with renowned New Zealand blues guitarist Thomas Oliver. He took lessons for the next 4 years from Thomas Oliver, who would become a major contributor to the decision to take music and guitar further with studies at The University of Otago. Jacob moved to Dunedin for the next three years and completed a Bachelor of Music majoring in Contemporary Guitar Performance learning under David Harrison. Despite undergoing treatment for cancer in his last semester he managed to complete his degree without delay. After doing so, he made the next logical step as a young professional living in New Zealand: moved to Australia.

Jacob has been immersed with ensemble playing since a child, first with cello in orchestras and chamber groups, and then with numerous bands through highs school and university. Jacob’s university lecturers would often cite his feel (to know where you are at each point in the music) as one of his strengths, which he likes to credit to playing in ensembles from a young age. This experience playing in ensembles has been invaluable for recording Trelissick Sessions videos, as they are often recorded on the spot with new musicians and without much time for rehearsal. Jacob feels that it is very important for students to engage with any performance or group opportunities that they have available to them, even if they have to be dragged to it like he might have been. Most of the application of learning happens when you’re playing music and performing with other musicians. If students can become comfortable performing with others it will tie together the concepts learned in lessons at an exponential rate.

Jacob as an 8 year old always looked forward to guitar lessons because his teachers made it so that he had fun and was engaged with the lesson, even if they did make little progress and he was occasionally derailing it. This environment fostered the spark and the realisation that he could actually play the songs that he liked on the guitar now, which spurred him to engage more in lessons and learn more. The skills that he had learned almost by accident in the group classes gave him agency to further his own learning in his own time, and once he started taking lessons from Thomas Oliver he was able to engage completely with learning about more abstract aspects of music theory and guitar performance. As a student Jacob found that he learnt the most when he was having fun or studied something that he could identify as inherently useful, which in turn caused him to engage more with lessons. As a student I was lucky to have teachers that could see this, and as a teacher I hope to do the same – ignite some sparks.

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