Kim De Cap - 2006 GuitarX - Marshall Scholarship Winner

I’ve been walking around in a dream ever since I got that call from GUITAR-X at the end of the summer telling me that I’d won the one year diploma scholarship. I can still remember coming to London for my audition and thinking that this was the place to be for a musician. A few weeks later I was packing my bags and guitars and actually left for the big city. Finding a place in London wasn’t very hard thanks to the house sharing list issued by the school.

This scholarship came like a gift from heaven: I was playing away on my guitar for hours a day, but I had the feeling that my progress was stagnating. I never had lessons before, but I felt that the time had come to get outside help. Also, there isn’t a very big interest in music in the town where I come from back in Belgium, which makes it very hard to find people to play with. So when I saw there was a contest I decided to give it a shot!

Meanwhile we’re in the 7th week in the musical capital of the world. I’m in the country that gave us The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and many more.

There is a musical event here every day of the week. I feel that I’ve reached the promised land. We have about three hours of class every day: classes like fretboard which teaches you the scales in the different positions, arpeggio’s, etc. Another class is ‘total guitar’ which deals with things like two handed tapping, finger picking, slide playing and other exotic techniques. Every week there are also two moments where you have to play in front of other people: one is the Live Performance Workshop. In this class each of us has to team up with Vocaltech students, Drumtech students and Guitar-X bass students to perform a song we’ve been given the week before. There is no better way of learning certain things than in front of an audience. Making mistakes here is a whole different thing than playing on your own.

The other class is Rhythm Section Skills, where we perform in front of our own group with a metronome, then with a bassist and finally with drums and bass.

Next to the more playing oriented classes there also tons of theory to be learnt. Classes like harmony and theory, sight reading and chart reading deal with this aspect of musical development. Last but not least; every few weeks we get to go in to the studio and learn all about what goes on in there. In short: we get a wholesome preparation for the music industry and all the necessary tools to help us become better musicians and reach our goals.

Once in a while the school organizes a big jam night in the George (a pub in Chiswick). On this social event we get to meet people from different groups, degree students, etc. Everyone who wants to gets a chance to get on stage and put everything they learned into practice in front of a live audience.

As you can see everything a musician needs is right here…