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Business & Tech

Manchester Man Wants West County to Rock

For Scott Smith, playing guitar is both a passion and a career.

With pop acts such as Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber dominating the airwaves, the guitar does not have the radio-dominating presence it enjoyed in the days of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. However Manchester resident Scott Smith not only makes his living teaching people to play the guitar, he said there is no shortage of people young and old enthusiastically picking up the six-stringed instrument.

Right now Smith has around 60 students, mostly from the West County area and is glad to say that that number has been steadly rising.

“Guitar Hero has been great for guitar teachers,” he said. For those who don’t know, Guitar Hero is a blockbuster video game in which players strum along on a guitar-shaped controller to classic and modern rock anthems. “Parents ask me all the time if they should let their kids play Guitar Hero, and I tell them it’s a good introduction. If nothing else, it introduces them to a lot of great music that wouldn’t necessarily be on their radar...and I can attest that a lot of those kids end up wanting to learn to play those songs for real,” he said.

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Not only are fads such as Guitar Hero encouraging more young people to take up the guitar, Smith said that more and more of those young people just happen to be female.

“When I started teaching I’d say about 10 percent of students that I saw were girls or women. Now that number is probably closer to 40 percent,” Smith said. The father of two girls ages 2 and 6, Smith said he sees no reason why America’s guitar shredding population shouldn’t be half men and half women. 

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“I think guitar lessons might really be the new piano lessons,” Smith said. “Back in my day, almost everyone—boys and girls—took piano lessons. Now the guitar is really the meat in almost every song, and parents are fine with, instead of having their kids learn the notes to 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,' letting them take guitar lessons and strum Green Day chords.”

Smith, a Kansas City, MO native, started taking piano lessons when he was 8, but when he first heard Van Halen’s 1984 album, he decided that the guitar was the instrument he really wanted to learn. 

After studying music at University of Kansas, Smith went to work for his dad’s company selling office furniture, a job that eventually transferred him to St. Louis. 

“I could be running the company that my dad started, or at least on my way to running it, and making, well, let’s just say a lot more money than I am now,” Smith said. “But I was literally falling asleep at work. I felt like my soul was being crushed doing a sales job.”

In 2001, Smith left that job and began giving guitar lessons for a studio in Webster Groves, at first acting as a subsitute for other teachers and eventually building his own student base. Although he liked teaching guitar, he wasn’t crazy about teaching for someone else and doing it the way his boss insisted. 

“Some people who run music schools insist on a sort of militant chord strumming or scale playing for the first few weeks of lessons,” Smith said. “I guess I can understand why, but it really drove some people away who I think could have made guitar ino a lifelong hobby or passion.”

Smith now operates indenpendently out of Mozingo Music Studios in Ellisville, a situation that lets him teach guitar the way he wants and the way he feels is most effective and fun for the student. 

“One thing I think my students like is that I won’t force them to play tracks from bands just because I might think they are good,” Smith said. “I know most of them will like a completely different music later in life. What's important is what they are listening to now.  That's my secret weapon: excitement about the material they choose.”

Smith’s own excitement for music is at no time more palpable than when he is on stage performing with his band The Matter. Smith said he hopes people come to see The Matter, see how much fun he is having on stage and are encouraged by that to take up the guitar.

“Playing music is something you’ll never be done getting good at,” Smith said. “It’s harder than you think at first, but the guitar, and really music in general, is a lifetime source of fun, and usually the player keeps moving the goal to beyond where their original ones were in the beginning.”

For information on lessons with Scott, contact him at 636-227-7893 or check out clip from one of his lessons here

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