Well didn’t the last couple of months rush by?

In this month’s MMM: a few important practical updates as we head towards the end of the year, along with a handful of listening & reading recommendations for the ever-darker evenings.

Enjoy!

Christmas opening hours & new term times

I’ll be teaching right up until Tuesday 23 December 2025, and then taking a couple of weeks off over Christmas and New Year.

Lessons will resume on Monday 5 January 2026.

As always, thank you for letting me know in advance about any dates you can’t make — it really helps with planning and offering spare slots to others.

New Term Structure (From January 2026)

I’ve recently reshuffled how the teaching year is structured. Instead of the traditional three long terms, the year is now broken into six main terms, with a shorter mini-term in the middle of summer.

The aim here is to create more manageable blocks of time, clearer goal-setting points for students, and slightly more breathing room across the year.

Here’s how the full 2026 teaching year now looks:

Carnival

5 January – 15 February 2026

Songbird

23 February – 5 April 2026

Blossom

13 April – 24 May 2026

Midsummer

1 June – 12 July 2026

Tide

20 July – 16 August 2026

4 weeks (the mini-term)

Harvest

24 August – 18 October 2026

Fall

26 October – 20 December 2026

These names may or may not be an excuse for me to indulge in mild poetic tendencies, but they also make it easier to track where we are in the year and plan and measure goals accordingly.

Waiting lists

For those of you currently on waiting lists: thank you again for your patience and perseverance. At the moment, wait times are looking like a couple of months, though this can shift as schedules change.

As ever, if you’d like a personal update, or just want to ask a few questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Read: ‘How To Paint With Sound’

An excellent and thoughtful article here for anyone interested in the lived, physical experience of being a musician, written by the philosopher Nigel Warbuton.

The importance of touch and its effect on timbre and tonal quality is something I try to regularly impart in lessons so I highly recommend reading this. It’s a fantastic reflection on touch, colour, and the physical relationship between player and instrument, with ideas that apply far beyond guitar.

Read it here:

Podcast: ‘The Sound Barrier’

If you’re more of a listening-to-podcasts-while-on-the-treadmill kind of cultural consumer, then here’s an interesting podcast episode exploring how we hear, interpret, and psychologically process sound:

A good one if you enjoy the crossover between science, perception, and music, and why sound can feel so powerful, unsettling, or emotional.

Listen here:

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/unexplainable/the-sound-barrier-1-the-myth-P0mtyQ_TS4v

Documentary: ‘Roots of Rhythm’

I love catching up with classic music documentaries, they literally don’t get made like this any more (or at all).

‘Roots of Rhythm’ was a three-part historical survey tracing the musical roots of latin, jazz, salsa, and many strands of popular music, presented and v/o’d by the late, great Harry Belafonte

It’s very much of its time (including some gloriously garish 1980s colour editing) but the content is rich and informative, especially for understanding rhythmic lineage and cultural transmission.

Well worth dipping into if rhythm and/or musical history are your bag.

That’s all for now. Wishing you all a calm end to term, and I’ll see many of you again before Christmas — or otherwise in the New Year.

Happy practising,

Will