Southwest Guitar Instruction

From One G Major Chord to Booking Gigs: How a Cornville Teacher Built a 30-Year Method One Student at a Time

George Schmidt has been teaching guitar full-time — not as a side project, not between gigs — for over 30 years. Roughly 20 of those years were spent in San Jose, California, two in Colorado Springs, and the last decade in and around Sedona, Arizona, where he now operates Southwest Guitar Instruction out of Cornville. That arc matters because it produced something rare: a teacher with a genuinely road-tested curriculum, not a collection of YouTube habits dressed up as a method.

Schmidt's own training is rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he studied under Tuck Andress — the Windham Hill jazz recording artist — and flamenco guitarist Mariano Cordoba of Capitol Records. That background in two technically demanding, stylistically opposite disciplines shows up in how he teaches. Students report working through theory, rhythm, chords, scales, tablature, fingerpicking, and both classical and contemporary technique. One former student went on to teach guitar herself; another, who started at age 10, used Skype lessons to stay with Schmidt when her family relocated and has been with him for over eight years.

The range of people Schmidt has worked with is not a marketing claim — it's documented in the reviews. A 66-year-old man who had suffered a debilitating brain injury started lessons with Schmidt and was booking paid gigs at art galleries and poetry events within five years. A student in Woodland Park, Colorado has been studying flamenco remotely — first by phone, now over the internet — for nearly 12 years. Others write from South Easton, Massachusetts; Las Vegas; Austin; and as far as Hong Kong. The geographic spread reflects a deliberate early adoption of distance instruction: Schmidt incorporated Skype lessons alongside in-person teaching well before remote learning became standard practice in music education.

What comes through repeatedly in the reviews is not just patience — though multiple students use that word — but a specific kind of structural flexibility. Schmidt does not run students through a preset song book. Instead, he builds foundational literacy first and then lets the student choose a direction. Rock, blues, folk, classical, and flamenco are all styles he has taught extensively, and he collaborated with Five Star Music in Sunnyvale, California on an instructional blues guitar package that earned a four-star rating from Guitar World Magazine and a 'Bravo' review in Guitar School Magazine. The curriculum breadth gives beginners room to discover what they actually want to play before they're locked into a single lane.

Schmidt teaches students from age 5 to 80, beginners to working performers. The reviews reflect that spectrum: a student who arrived unable to get past a G major chord, a man navigating the aftermath of a brain injury, a teenager preparing for auditions, a guitarist who had studied with multiple instructors over 20 years before landing with Schmidt. What they share is a sense that the lessons were shaped around them, not the other way around.

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