It’s week three in our Musical Journeys series, and this week we’re talking to Matt.

Meet Matt.

He’s a guitar teacher and player and he’s telling us all about his musical journey.

So I started learning the flute when I was around eight years old. I carried on with that for about three years but then I got bored. I regret giving it up now, I wish I had stuck with it.

I didn’t really play anything until I started playing the guitar. And the only reason I started doing that was because my brother gave his away to his girlfriend’s brother, without asking me. That made me want a guitar of my own and I’m still playing 20 years later!

I started on an electric guitar with an amp but I lost interest fairly quickly until my friend got a drum kit. And then there was someone to make noise with. By this time I was about 13 or 14 and we had begun to carve out our own musical taste.

So we used to go down to his house and jam pretty much every weekend. Later on we were joined by another friend who also got a guitar. Another friend borrowed our drummer’s Dad’s bass and we had a band!

We carried that on through school. We had really good music teachers there. They were really encouraging. We would miss some other lessons to practise for a concert and the music teacher was fine about it.

I wasn’t reading music, just using tabs and learning from songs.

But our music teacher was encouraging and allowed us space to do our own thing, find a way of expressing ourselves. It meant we could do exactly what we wanted. And that gives us that ability then to really engage more with the instrument. If you want to create your own music at any point, you have to have the confidence to go through that process of making mistakes, and knowing how to come back from them. If you say you have to learn these three songs perfectly. But we just tried to learn other people’s songs.

We never learned them properly. They were sort of hashed versions, but they sounded close enough and they sounded different enough. We used to do a version of House Of The Rising Sun. So I would start off really slowly and then we just put it in triple time just for the craic.

During the last year at school I decided to continue with music. I looked at various colleges and the school did have a music A level. The heads of sixth form at my school told me it would be very detrimental if I left the school and went to another college. My music teachers said just go. They said, it’s better for you if you don’t do it at A level. Just go.

The facilities were amazing. They had a Mac suite with 30 plus Macs. All running Logic.

They’d give us little movies and we’d have to write 30 music clips for them.

So I met another lad on the course who could sing. So we came up with the grand idea of starting a blues rock band. And he knew a drummer. I knew a bass player from the old band. So we thought we’d get together in his kitchen, one Saturday afternoon and we wrote an old rocky punky type song and we played together for about four years after that.

After that I decided to stay on at Newcastle College and do a degree in jazz, popular and commercial music. January of 2012, I saw an advert on Gumtree of someone looking for a piano player. I didn’t play but I decided to see if they’d like a guitar player instead.

And so we met at the Sage one Saturday. I ran through some songs like Over The Rainbow. And maybe a year after graduation I got a gig doing the Wedding Singer, the musical.

And then John, who was the drummer in the quintet, got me on to a cabaret show in Seaton Deleval.

Then I met you, Hannah, and did some duo stuff at Newcastle Airport, every Sunday. We did Lounge, Jazz.

And then there was a crossover period when Charlotte was the singer we worked with. We got together and performed.

How did you manage through Covid as a teacher?

So Covid moved all online on Zoom. Not everyone moved across but most of my students were up for it. For the most part it worked pretty well. And then last September I started doing this community project, providing lessons and tuition on guitar and drums for people in the Tanfield and Stanley area and further field. Anyone can attend. Even if you don’t have an instrument, there are instruments there you can use.