Louis holding his RSL Grade 5 electric guitar certificate —online guitar lessons Teddington
Some students you teach for a term. Some you teach for five years, and you get to watch a boy turn into a musician in front of you. Louis is the second kind. He came to me at eleven, working out the melody of a-ha’s Take On Me on a single string from a YouTube tab he’d found himself. He has just come away from RSL Grade 5 Electric Guitar with a Merit — at sixteen, heading into sixth form, and already a regular performer at school. What makes his story worth telling is that almost all of it has happened over a screen. Louis is in Manchester. I’m in Teddington. Five years of online guitar lessons Teddington-based and Manchester-bound, and it has worked brilliantly.
That photo above says most of it. But you should hear him play — so there are two clips of Louis dotted through this post, shared with his parents’ kind permission.
Where It Started: One String, One Tune, No Permission Needed
Before Louis had a single lesson with me, he was already teaching himself. He’d find tabs on YouTube for pop songs he loved and pick the melodies out one string at a time. It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. That instinct — I like this tune, I’m going to find it on the guitar — is the single best predictor I know of a student who’ll still be playing a decade later. It cannot be taught. You can only feed it.
And there was plenty to feed. Louis lives in Manchester, and the city’s musical DNA was in the room from day one. New Order. The Smiths. Records I love as much as he does, which meant we had a shared language from the very first lesson. When a teacher and a student genuinely like the same music, the lesson stops being a transaction and starts being a conversation.
What He Brought With Him
Three things were obvious early:
- Melodic recall. Louis hears a line once and it’s in there. Ear-led players learn repertoire faster because they’re not decoding — they’re recognising.
- A natural sense of rhythm. Time feel is the hardest thing to install and the easiest thing to spot. He had it.
- No fear of expression. Plenty of young players hide behind the notes. Louis has never been afraid to lean into a phrase, bend something a little further than the page suggests, and sound like himself.
Watch: Back in Black — AC/DC
Back in Black is one of those riffs that sounds easy and absolutely isn’t. Almost all of it is in the gaps. Rush the rests and the whole thing turns into mush; sit on them and it swaggers. Louis leaves the space in the groove, smoothly executes an original solo, and efficiently lands the chord stabs where they should be. That’s a player who is synced up with the rest of the band, listening to the arrangement as a whole, not just to his own hands.
Why Online Lessons Have Worked So Well for Louis
I’ll be honest — when we started on Zoom I wasn’t sure how long Louis would stay a guitar student of mine. A boy in Manchester, a teacher in London, no shared room to build the habit in. Five years later I’d argue the online format is one of the reasons it lasted.
Louis is a busy sixteen-year-old. Sport, other hobbies, a demanding academic schedule. A weekly lesson that costs him a car journey and forty minutes of travel either side is a lesson that gets cancelled the first time life gets tight. A lesson that happens at his desk, guitar already in the room, does not. That flexibility is exactly why I built online guitar lessons Teddington students and remote students alike can rely on — the technology has long since stopped being the interesting part. What matters is that the lesson is easy to keep.
He’s also had guitar lessons at school running alongside our work, which I’ve always encouraged. Two teachers, complementary material, more playing hours in the week. It has never been competition; it has been reinforcement.
Watch: Canned Heat — Jamiroquai
If Back in Black shows Louis’s control, Canned Heat shows his feel. Funk is unforgiving: the notes are simple, the rhythm is everything, and the right hand has to keep moving even when it isn’t hitting the strings. Get it slightly wrong and it’s just chords. Get it right and the room moves.
Watching a sixteen-year-old switch between Australian hard rock and London Acid Jazz in the same lesson tells you something about the range he’s built. This is a long way from one string and a YouTube tab.
The Exam Habit: Pulling a Rabbit Out of the Hat
Here is the trait that has defined Louis’s grade work. Every single time we’ve approached an in-person exam deadline, he has pulled a rabbit out of the hat.
He knows the benchmark. He knows exactly what the examiner wants to hear, and once the date is fixed he applies himself with a focus that is genuinely impressive to watch. Pieces that were 80% in June are performance-ready in August. Improvisation chops are revised and tested in lessons leading up. Technical work that was scrappy gets clean. He pulls out all the stops.
That’s not luck and it isn’t last-minute panic. It’s a young player who has learned how to raise his own standard on demand — which is, incidentally, the skill that graded exams are really teaching. The certificate is the receipt. The ability to take something to performance standard by a fixed date is the actual product.
Grade 5 Electric Guitar — Merit
The Grade 5 syllabus is where RSL starts asking properly grown-up questions. The repertoire demands stamina and control across a full piece rather than a good riff. The technical exercises expect fluency, not survival. And the supporting tests reward exactly the ear that Louis has been quietly building since he was picking out Take On Me on one string.
A Merit at this level is a serious result, and it sits on top of everything that came before it. You can read more about the framework on the RSL Awards website if you’d like to see how the grades are structured.
The Balance Most Students Never Find
It is never plain sailing. It shouldn’t be. Academic demands inevitably pull young students away from music for stretches — mocks, coursework, exam season. I’ve seen that period end a lot of promising guitar journeys.
Louis found the answer that I wish every teenager found. During the busy stretches, guitar stayed in his life as enjoyment and creative release rather than as another thing to be assessed on. He kept playing because he wanted to play. Then, when the schedule opened up again, he switched back into intense bursts of progress.
That rhythm — low-intensity engagement, then high-intensity push, repeated over five years — is worth more than five years of relentless grinding. Grinding burns out. This doesn’t.
Watch: Louis Performing at School
This is another favourite of Louis, and it has less to do with technique. Grades measure what a player can do alone in a room with an examiner. This measures what he can do in front of people, with a band, when something inevitably goes slightly wrong and nobody in the audience ever finds out.
Louis performs regularly at school now. The eleven-year-old who joined me on Zoom would not have believed that. Confidence is the thing the guitar has quietly handed him, and it is worth more than the certificate. Next time he’ll have Guitar Solo duties!
The Family Behind It
I have to say something about Louis’s family, who over five years have become friends and whom I hold in genuinely high esteem. They have steered him from an eleven-year-old boy with a guitar and a YouTube tab to a sixteen-year-old who performs regularly at school, and they’ve done it without ever once turning music into a source of pressure.
Getting that balance right is much harder than it looks. Too little support and the instrument gathers dust; too much and the child learns to resent it. Louis’s parents have consistently landed in the middle — encouraging, present, and completely relaxed about the fact that some months are guitar months and some months aren’t. A huge amount of what I’ve described above traces back to them. My thanks to them, too, for letting me share these clips.
What’s Next: Grade 6, Sixth Form and UCAS Points
Louis is moving into sixth form, and Grade 6 Electric Guitar is next on the list. This is the point where graded music exams stop being purely for the love of it and start counting on paper: RSL Grades 6, 7 and 8 carry UCAS tariff points, so Grade 6 will sit alongside his A-levels as part of his application. A Merit at Grade 6 is worth 10 UCAS points; a Distinction, 12.
I don’t think Louis is doing it for the points. But it’s a nice illustration of something I tell parents often — the guitar isn’t in competition with the academic work. At this level it can quietly contribute to it.
Between you and me, he’s not far off hired-gun territory. Blue electric over his shoulder, two very different styles already under his fingers, and the sight-reading to learn a set at short notice. If the Foo Fighters call needing someone at a moment’s notice, Louis will brush up and deliver in time.
Why This Story Matters If You’re Looking for Lessons
If you’re a parent weighing up whether online tuition can really work, or whether your child will stick with an instrument through GCSEs, Louis’s five years say most of what I’d want to say:
- Feed the self-starting instinct. The tunes they find themselves are worth more than the tunes you hand them.
- Shared taste matters. A teacher who loves the music your child loves will keep them in the room.
- Online removes friction. For a busy teenager, the easiest lesson to attend is the one that’s already in the house.
- Consistency beats intensity — but intensity has its moment. Stay engaged in the quiet months so you can push hard in the loud ones.
- Let it be fun when it needs to be fun. Creative release is not a break from progress. It’s what makes progress survivable.
A Small Part in Something Big
I’m thrilled to have played a small part in Louis’s journey, and slightly amazed at how much has happened across a Zoom window. Music — and specifically the guitar, his principal instrument — has planted a confidence in him that he’ll carry into rooms that have nothing to do with music at all. Watching that take root over five years has been phenomenal.
He’s sixteen. He’s got a Merit at Grade 5, a Grade 6 in his sights, a school stage he plays on regularly, and an ear that will keep finding tunes long after the last exam. That’s the whole job, really.
Want Your Child to Write Their Own Success Story?
Whether you’re local and searching for lessons in person, or anywhere in the UK and looking for online guitar lessons Teddington players and remote students both rely on, I teach students of all ages and abilities — beginners through to Grade 8 and beyond. You can see how I structure lessons on my guitar lessons page, or go straight to the diary.
Book your free first lesson here. I’d love to help.
Check out the RSL grade syllabuses here: https://www.rslawards.com/
