I teach piano, guitar, bass guitar, ukulele, mandolin, blues harmonica and music theory, one-to-one, from my home in Thames Ditton and online. Some of my students are six years old and some are sixty. Some are working towards Grade 8 and some have no intention of ever sitting an exam. What they nearly all have in common is that they arrived with a particular piece of music they wanted to be able to play — which is the best reason I know, and the thing we start from.

On guitar that means electric (rock, blues and jazz, plectrum and fingerstyle) as well as classical and flamenco; on piano, classical and rock/pop. I also teach blues harmonica and music theory, and I have taught beginners on drum kit, sitar and dilruba. I have been teaching all ages for more than 35 years, much of it peripatetically in primary, secondary and sixth-form schools and colleges.

Music for film and television

Alongside the teaching, I write music for film and television. It is the other half of my working week, and it is not a sideline — it is where the teaching gets its authority from.

Productions I have provided music for include Tribal Wives (BBC Two), Bear Grylls: Man vs. Wild (Sky) and Around the World in 80 Trades (BBC Two).

It matters for lessons in a way that is easy to miss. Someone who writes to a brief and a deadline has to be able to take a piece of music apart and see what makes it work — which is exactly the skill a student needs borrowed when they arrive with a song and no idea how to begin. I am not teaching from a book I was handed. I am teaching what I use.

It is also why the instrument list is long. Scoring rewards a player who can cover the unusual thing a cue asks for — sitar, tabla and dilruba as readily as cello, violin or guitar — and playing it beats reaching for a sample library that approximates it.

Stringed instruments hanging on a plain wall: a red sunburst mandolin, two long-necked lutes with skin-covered bodies, a sitar, and beside it a smaller instrument with an inlaid teardrop body; the headstock of a bass guitar and a row of books below. — The instrument room — one of the two rooms I teach in; the piano has a room of its own. Photograph: Hardy Hemmingway.

If you are here about hiring rather than learning: what scoring a project with me involves, and live music for weddings, functions and events.

How I got here

My first degree was a Bachelor of Music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where I learned to take a piece of music apart and see how it works. I then did a Master of Music in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, which takes the world's traditions seriously as music, and gives Hindustani classical and gamelan the attention usually reserved for the Western canon. I came out with the strong suspicion that I had been taught only one of several possible answers to what a note is.

So I went to India to learn the sitar, because it is not an instrument you can learn from books or from London. (Details of who I studied under and where are being added to this page.)

What actually changed

I expected to come back with a second instrument. What I came back with was a different idea about the first one. In Hindustani music, ornament is not decoration added to a note — it is where the note lives, and a raga is closer to a character than to a scale. When I next sat down with a Bach sarabande, the ornaments stopped looking like instructions and started sounding like the same instinct: a note as something that moves. I have taught differently ever since, and my piano students get the benefit of it without ever touching a sitar.

How I teach

I ask what you want to play. Not what genre you like — the actual piece. Almost everybody who takes lessons has one in mind, and almost nobody is asked about it, because it is easier to open a book at page one and work forwards.

So we start there instead, and take the thing apart. Nine times out of ten a piece somebody loves turns out to need exactly the skills they would have been taught anyway — a scale, a chord shape, a way of counting — but now there is a reason for them, and a reason is worth about six months of diligence. Grades and exams are available and plenty of my students take them; they simply are not the route in.

It also means I will happily teach a nine-year-old a song off the radio and a retired engineer a Chopin nocturne in the same evening, and think of those as the same job.

Bach, and the Beatles

Two things I am unapologetic about. Bach, because the Two-Part Inventions and the Well-Tempered Clavier are where you can hear a mind working — one line arguing with another — and there is nothing better for teaching a pair of hands to become a pair of ears. And the Beatles, because they are how I started, because there is something in that catalogue that just about everybody loves, whatever else they listen to, and because Blackbird is a Bach idea in a folk guitar part: a bass line and a tune moving together over an open string, so that learning to play it is a lesson in two-part playing whether you meant to have one or not.

I do not think those are separate interests. Both traditions say the same thing: that a good tune and a good bass line are the same idea approached from two ends. Most of the teaching I am proudest of is the moment a student stops believing there is a wall between them.

Credentials, plainly

Bachelor of Music, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Master of Music in Ethnomusicology, SOAS, University of London.
Working composer for film and television; published member of PRS for Music.
Trained on the sitar in India, in the traditional way. Also plays the dilruba.
ABRSM Grade 8 classical guitar, Grade 8 classical piano and Grade 5 violin.
More than 35 years teaching music to all ages, including peripatetic teaching in primary, secondary and sixth-form schools and colleges.

Not the other Tom Ashton

A quick note, because it comes up. There is another Tom Ashton who plays the guitar — a founder member of the 1980s band The March Violets. Good musician; not me. If you were looking for him, you have taken a wrong turn. If you were looking for a music teacher in Surrey, you are in the right place.

About Tom Ashton