Growing up inside the Los Angeles music scene, I spent my teenage years at Joe’s Garage recording studio, surrounded by players like Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan, watching world-class musicians work at close range. By 18, residencies at the Whisky A Go-Go, the Key Club, and the Troubadour were already on the books. The playing was good. But every serious player eventually hits the same wall: the point where more practice stops producing more progress.

That question is what turned me into a biomechanics specialist.

Before looking for answers in the science, I went looking in the music. A full scholarship to Cal State Northridge came first, where studying through a direct Segovia teaching lineage reshaped how I understood the instrument entirely. Competition wins followed: the Randy Rhoads grant and the American String Teachers Association regional. Then a move to Europe to compete internationally against the world’s best classical players, with continued training at the Koblenz Guitar Academy and the Cologne Conservatory of Music in Germany.

From there: head of the guitar department at the American International School in Vienna. Two years touring Europe performing classical and acoustic fingerstyle music. This eventually was followed by session and touring work with TLC, Snoop Dogg, Mavis Staples, and T-Pain, parts writing for Grammy-winning songwriter Johnny Conte, whose credits include Shakira, Gwen Stefani, and Rihanna. Recording credits on one of Germany’s highest-grossing classical albums of 2008, and on Gallant’s Grammy-winning “Weight in Gold.” 

All of that built something most technique instructors don’t have: a wide enough frame of reference to see the same mechanical problems showing up across every genre and skill level. The problems looked different on the surface but underneath, they came from the same small set of mechanical errors.

That’s what I teach. Not style, not genre, not songs. The physical mechanics of how the hands work on the guitar: what efficient movement actually looks like, why tension accumulates, and how to build technique that holds up under real playing conditions. The core framework is called The Big Three — Natural Position, Relaxation, and Efficiency — and everything comes back to those three things, in that order.

If you’ve been playing for years and feel like your progress has stalled, it’s almost never about talent or practice time. It’s mechanical. And mechanical problems have specific fixes. That’s what I’m here to help you find.