Tomas Michaud is a world class guitarist, recording artist, and music educator. He is the owner and School Director of the SF Bay Area’s premier music education facility, Starland School of Music in Alameda, CA.
As a Music Educator he has taught or consulted with thousands of students and instructors over the past thirty years. He is credited with developing the Starland Guitar System – a unique , systematic approach to learning to play guitar with ease and confidence.
In addition he is the author of seven CDs of Contemporary Instrumental World Music including his latest top ten charting “Beauty and Fire”.
- Tomas' Music
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Learn the basics of Spanish/New Flamenco guitar (the style Tomas is best known for).
My first career, weightlifting, didn’t work out. My muscles didn’t grow much. I decided I needed something that didn’t require heavy lifting.
I picked up my first guitar when I was 14 years old, I learned a few open chords, a few bar chords and some licks from popular songs. I could play some bits and pieces but never really got anywhere. I began getting really frustrated because even though I learned many things from different places, no matter what I did I couldn’t turn that into playing the way I really wanted to play, to jam with other people, to feel confident, to experience the ease that I saw with the people that I admired and how I imagined it could be.
Then as a young adult I stumbled across a cassette course on achieving goals. I won’t go into too much detail, but the main idea was to achieve large, even what might seem like impossible goals by breaking them down to smaller steps. It was at a time when I was taking martial arts and I realized that the people that were successful just followed the system. I took this insight and ran with it.
First I researched how other guitarist learned. I read books, contacted private teachers and translated what I learned from them into a step by step program to improve my guitar playing over a period of 2 years.
Somewhat To My Surprise It Really Worked...
Of course I made refinements as I went along. I tried some things that didn’t work, I added new material as more information came to me and “fell of the horse” a few times. There were times I felt discouraged and didn’t practice as much as I wanted to. But at the end of the 2 year period my guitar playing improved tremendously. In fact I had made more progress in that 2 year period than I made in the previous 10 years.
Then one day my oldest daughter asked me to teach her guitar. I decided to use the system I had developed to teach her. To my surprise it worked even better with her. I’ve named it “Real Guitar Success”.
If you’re interested you can read more about Real guitar Success here.
You can find Tomas on Google+