Built by a working guitar teacher

Hey, I'm Mike

I started teaching guitar around 2000, back in college, and went straight into it full-time, one-on-one lessons by day, recording and producing bands in the studio the rest of the time. Music has been the whole career: teaching, playing, and engineering.

Seven or eight years in, I moved my teaching online, building instructional guitar sites, first RockGuitarPower.com, then SuperGuitarLicks.com. That meant filming courses, editing video, and above all writing out tab and chord charts for every single lesson. It worked, and students loved it, but the production time was brutal. The lesson took an hour; the materials took the evening.

That's the itch Fret Beam scratches. Play a lick once and Deep Listen, the purpose-trained guitar ear built into the app, puts the tab on screen about a second later, accurate enough to hand to a student, live on a call or recorded for a course. And it goes way past licks: ask for any chord shape, any scale pattern, any arpeggio, or a whole chord progression, and it's on screen immediately. No page-flipping, no drawing diagrams while a student waits.

The other half is the looper. Record a guitar loop on the spot to demonstrate a lick, then play over it to create new ones, or import a backing track and teach right over that. Everything the lesson needs, generated while you teach. It's the tool I always wanted at my side of the lesson, built by someone who has actually sat there.

These days I split my time between Fret Beam, teaching, and the digital-marketing agency I run, which is exactly the mix of skills it takes to help guitar teachers build a real online teaching business, not just software. I'm based in Rochester, NY, and when I'm not working you'll find me snowboarding, wing foiling, or training for a triathlon, usually with a guitar somewhere within reach.