Need a guitar or mandolin teacher?
Let Marcel, Mickey and Andy help you out
lessons anywhere
Can’t find any good teachers in your area? No problem! With the help of video chat services like Skype, we’ve taught all over the world from Canada to Australia and beyond.
Learn What You Want
Tired of teachers putting you in a ‘program’? we use individualized lesson plans, exercises and custom transcriptions for each student. Tell us what you want to learn, we’ll listen.
All Levels Accepted
Don’t let advanced content scare you, we teach lots of pickers who are new to bluegrass. Every player can benefit from a teacher, get help with what you need today.
Meet The LWM Instructors!
Marcel, Mickey, Hayes, and Andy
Marcel Ardans
Big Bad Billy Goat
Marcel Ardans is a guitarist, teacher and YouTuber active in the Raleigh music scene. His time in the bluegrass scene began in the Pacific Northwest, where he wood-shedded and gigged extensively with local and regional acts. Rightfully earning the nickname “The Biggest Baddest Billy Goat In The Barnyard”. 150 shows a year led to opening for national artists such as Kyle Gass (of Tenacious D), the late Jeff Austin, Jacob Jolliff, Missy Raines, and festival favorites such as, Special Consensus, The Purple Hulls, and Chris Jones & The Night Drivers.
In 2015, he started the online business Lessons With Marcel. The goal was to bring flatpicking and bluegrass guitar to those who wanted instruction but lacked local resources, essentially trying to make bluegrass more accessible, to grow the community.
Since then Marcel has hosted local events, taught guitar workshops, and had the opportunity to interview some of the best contemporary bluegrass guitarists on YouTube, like Trey Hensley, Zeb Snyder, Andy Hatfield, and Jon Stickley. Billy Strings once said of a LWM YouTube video, “Whoa. . . this guy just taught me how I play”.
In 2017, Marcel moved to Raleigh, NC. By partnering with supportive and commendable brands like Straight Up Strings, Strum Machine, and Guitar Pro, his schedule is now filled with LWM Skype students and shooting videos for the Lessons With Marcel YouTube Channel.
Mickey Abraham
The Rabbi
Mickey Abraham is a Suncoast Emmy award-winning performer and instructor. Mickey has been involved in bluegrass and new-acoustic music in his home state of Florida and on the national scene for nearly twenty years. He teaches both mandolin and guitar lessons, and his approach to playing has been featured in Bluegrass Unlimited and Flatpicking Guitar Magazine.
Joe Craven, acoustic maestro says, “Mickey’s enthusiasm for music inspires his students, that’s the hallmark of a great teacher”. His influence as an educator extends to the Tallahassee Youth Orchestra’s Acoustic Ensembles.
Mickey performs alongside Kathryn Belle in their band Belle and the Band. In 2018, their song “Tallahassee”, was named Best Florida Song by the Will Mclean Foundation. And in 2019, Mickey and Kathryn met their fundraising goal through Kickstarter to start producing their new concept album, Voices: A Folk Opera. Their new project combines elements of Broadway with folk music to bring characters, locations, and a story to life.
Mickey spends his days recording, teaching lessons, and creating arrangements for Lessons With Marcel. Perhaps Flatpicking Guitar Magazine’s founder and editor Dan Miller sums up Mickey best by saying, “I predict that in the future you will not only hear a lot of great music from Mickey, but you will hear other talented players who will say ‘I learned from Mickey Abraham’”.
Hayes Griffin
Space Cowboy
Hayes Griffin is a musician, teacher, and YouTuber from central Ohio. After earning a degree in music from Denison University, Hayes received his Master’s in Contemporary Improvisation at New England Conservatory in Boston. He quickly became an active member of the local bluegrass community, studying with the great John McGann and recording the Trimountain Sessions EP with bluegrass phenoms Maddie Witler, Gabe Hirshfeld, John Mailander, and Josh Dayton.
After school, Hayes spent over a decade touring internationally with acts like Canadian fiddler April Verch and progressive bluegrass band Newtown. Featuring Hayes on guitar, Newtown’s 2016 album Harlan Road debuted at #8 on the Billboard Bluegrass Charts. In 2020, he released his first solo project, Midwestern Swing, dedicated to the sounds of American country and Western Swing music from the 1930’s, 40s, and 50s. The album snagged the #1 spot on the Local Spins Hot Top 5 for 2020, charting in the Top 5 for 3 months straight.
In 2020 Hayes began a weekly YouTube series on the playing of electric mandolinist Tiny Moore. Since then, Hayes’ channel has evolved to include weekly videos on bluegrass guitar, Western Swing, music theory, and mindfulness.
These days, Hayes spends his time teaching lessons, recording YouTube videos, and serving his growing community of online students in his Guitar Club. Hayes is proud to endorse GHS Strings and Belmuse Electric Mandolin
Andy Hatfield
mandohat
Andy Hatfield is a creative musician and teacher who loves to help students of all levels learn to play music. He has taught music full-time since 2003, and specializes in mandolin and guitar.
Andy is known for winning three National Championships: The 2011 and the 2017 National Flatpicking Championship, and the 2013 National Mandolin Championship. He is one of only four people (and the second from Peoria, IL) to win both mandolin and guitar in the 45+ year history of the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas.
Born into a musical family, Andy started out by playing upright bass when his parents would leave the house. “We had a lot of instruments around, and nobody ever said you couldn’t touch them, but I assumed I’d get in trouble for playing that bass. Instead, once Dad knew what I was up to, he gave me a few pointers, announced that I would be the bass player that weekend, and we went off to the festival to jam. From that point, I was hooked.”
Later learning to play mandolin, guitar, and banjo, Andy spent his teens immersed in Illinois’s rich bluegrass scene.
Andy has taught for several years at Steve Kaufman’s Kamp in Maryville, TN. He is a 2001 graduate of Bradley University, earning a Bachelor’s of Science in Music. In 2018, he was the featured instructor at Roberto Dalla Vecchia’s Acoustic Guitar Camp in Vicenza, Italy.
Have questions before you sign up?
We've got answers
We’ll meet online! Skype and Google Meet is used for a majority of online one-on-one students. Skype can require a download and installation so Google Meet has served the less tech savvy students quite well, especially if you have familiarity with Google products!
Visit Skype online for more information on their service or setup a Gmail account to access Google Meet from your web browser. We will never charge you for a lesson that’s cancelled due to technical difficulties.
If you have another service you prefer please let us know!
We teach between 10AM and 8PM EST. Lesson slots start on the hour and can sometimes go over if the conversation gets carried away. There are sometimes exceptions to the times lessons can be scheduled, so don’t be afraid to ask about a specific time if your schedule doesn’t line up perfectly with ours!
We teach on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We do avoid scheduling later lessons on Thursday and Friday evenings because that’s typically when we play live shows. Let’s stay away from canceling lessons and schedule later lessons earlier in the week!
If you have any special needs or concerns in these areas be sure to include them in the message box below. We will do our best to accommodate you!
Lessons are $60 for 45 minutes. For those interested in a single lesson, please let us know in the message box below!
We accept payment through the website, which is tied to PayPal, and for those hip youths Venmo is absolutely valid as well. Both services are safe and secure, you can find out more about them on their own websites.
In the rare circumstance that neither of these payment options work for you please be sure to mention it in the message box to the left and we can find another solution! (i.e. check, money order or any other possibility).
Depending on your schedule and teacher availability your wait will likely be 5 months or longer.
If you’d like to minimize your wait time consider when you’d be able to take lessons. We have a lot of students already waiting to take lessons at 6pm eastern or later. If you can take your lesson at 10am eastern or do a lunch time lesson at 1pm eastern, I guarantee you will be placed sooner!
If your schedule is pretty tight, don’t worry. We also offer free regular waiting list Q&A calls. A pair of LWM teachers will get on a group call with as many waiting list members want to attend and we’ll start answering questions.
Worst comes to worst you might be waiting a little longer but we do eventually get to everyone on the wait list.
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Please do not pay for a lesson unless you’ve already filled out the sign up form above and heard back from us. Without a completed form we have no way to contact you or consider you for lessons!