About Nick
Nick Minnion - a biography
Nick Minnion was born in 1957 in Guildford, Surrey, England.
Having begun to teach himself to play guitar at the age of 8, Nick was hired to teach a group of beginners at his local primary school whilst still only 15 years old.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s Nick worked in a wide variety of jobs chiefly connected with teaching and training and also travelled around Northern Europe as a working musician. Playing guitar in a number of now-forgotten rock and blues bands.
Music has always played a central role in Nick’s life, but he also has a passion for aviation. In the mid 80s Nick teamed up with aircraft designer Ian Grayland to form the now legendary microlight aircraft manufacturing company Aerial Arts Ltd. Aerial Arts produced the popular Clubman hanglider and the World Championship winning Chaser S flexwing microlight. Many of these aircraft are still flying today.
Retiring from the aviation industry in 1990, after a brief spell of doing a real job, Nick went back to being a full-time musician in 1993.
Although performing regularly, his forte for teaching guitar began to dominate Nick’s working life and in 1995 he founded ‘Nick’s Music Studios’ in Brighton on the English South Coast. The Studios expanded to a three-storey building in Hove comprising 8 separate teaching and rehearsal studios. Here approximately 200 students enjoyed music lessons taught by around 20 tutors specially recruited and trained by Nick.
Then in 2002 Nick left the studios to a management team and moved on to launch the teachguitar.com website and write three ebooks designed to help people all over the world break away from their day-jobs and become great guitar teachers. Thousands of copies of these Ebooks have been sold over the years since and TeachGuitar.com continues to be a top resource for Guitar teachers and anyone considering going into guitar teaching.
In 2005 Nick launched – Rockschools UK ltd. – a scheme to help young musicians get together in bands and perform live on stage at regular events.
Early in 2010, leaving the Rock School project in the capable hands of Craig Brooks and his team of multi-instrumentalist tutors, Nick once again turned his attention to the Internet and began creating a series of video-based guitar lessons, creating a new website SecretGuitarTeacher.com.
In 2011 Nick moved to the French Alps to devote 100% of his working time to his internet-based projects. He admits however, that ‘working time’ had to compete with skiing and playing tennis, as well as time spent getting back into live performing for the fun of it.
In 2016 Nick returned to the UK and moved to the New Forest Coast. Having missed teaching face to face during the previous five years, he once again built up a client base of students who come to his home-based teaching studios in New Milton.
At time of writing (2023) Nick continues to teach face to face 1:1 lessons as well as running occasional group teaching and performing sessions, playing bass in local pub band Be More Dog and occasionally playing lead and rhythm guitar as a dep for other bands, filling in when their regular guitarist is unavailable.
In between all that Nick has been working for the last three years on a new guitar-learning course which he plans to launch as Secret Guitar Teacher Interactive later this year.
Watch this space for news of that!
Contact Nick to arrange a lesson
- Call/Text Nick on: 07434 412672
