Randy Roos

"For private lessons, I think the important thing is not to approach a student with a set list of things that you feel that they need. I think it's more important to try to figure out where the student's heading. If they've got something already started, I feel it's my responsibility to enhance that, not to pull them away from it with material that might have been important to me, but might not be important to them."

"My classroom teaching is more in the production range. The Recording Techniques for Guitarists class centers on giving students the basic skills to record themselves and small ensembles, and then to be able to work with those recordings production-wise to flush them out; orchestrate them; and mix them really nicely, with effects and coloration, to get them to sound polished and really well produced. A lot of students really need the basics in terms of the technical things, and we try to cover that as completely as possible, but always with the goal to making a recording that is moving to listen to in some way."

"Everyone's got the tools now, and if a player is presenting their music, it needs to be at a certain level, because we're accustomed to a fairly high level of production recording quality. That's the idea of the course, to give them the kind of skills that will let them get their music out there and be at a level that's in accordance with what we're accustomed to hearing."

"A lot of folks who have come to me for private lessons are looking for new and different approaches to harmony in a more contemporary, advanced sort of jazz setting, rather than a traditional one. I think the fact that I'm coming at that from a rock and blues background is kind of interesting to some people. I've also done a lot of TV scoring. A lot of people who do scoring are keyboard players, and my approach from guitar is somewhat different from that. It's a bridge between guitar and scoring."