Professional info

 

Jacob Packer has been playing guitar for 26 years, and has a wide range of experience from music writing, teaching and performing. He started out learning Rock and Metal songs for the first three years of playing until moving forward as an original song writer. He spent over 10 active years in the local Detroit music scene, before deciding to attend music school where he expanded his repertoire, and breadth of knowledge and skill. He studied and worked in California, London, Ohio and Detroit. In 2010 Jacob earned a Bachelor's degree in Music. Guitar and vocals are his main instruments, although he teaches Bass, Piano, and In-Home Recording as well.

Teaching Style

 

Jacob has designed a lesson plan that first focuses on guitar: technique; chord progressions; scales and some note reading; tablature. Then moving on to learning the basic modes and the musical styles that accompany each mode. The students choose their favorite songs to learn and then he teaches them how theory applies to the songs they are learning. He likes to focus on each student's personal strength- be it performance, composition, theory, etc. The over-all goal is to get the intro and intermediate students up and going with a nice solid foundation, and the advanced students who are interested in composition and recording are pushed in the direction of using the theory they have been shown to write their own original songs. Not only do the students learn the theory of writing original compositions, but they are also introduced to a large variety of fun and creative techniques to generate their material. What most students like about Jacob's teaching style is that he makes the theory part of learning fun, and he introduces it in a way that encourages the student to start writing original material, without getting locked into theory at the cost of the thier creativity. Also, the song-writing games that are implemented have been very effective in pulling creative ideas out of his students. The lesson plans used are very well-rouded and are adapted to each student's specific creative needs and learining style.

Instruments

 

Bass Guitar

Piano