Guitar Instructor
George Cole has taught guitar lessons to promising musicians for over twenty-five years. He began teaching guitar lessons in California in the 1980s. Among his many students, he taught and mentored Billie Joe Armstrong for ten years and the bassist Mike Dirnt of the punk rock band Green Day. "Cole and Billie Joe would frequently spend afternoons jamming together, free-form style with the teacher winging off as many odd notes as his pupil. He helped them have their first recording session at a studio at RDR studios in San Francisco in 1986. Armstrong received his first electric guitar, a Fernandes Stratocaster copy that he named "Blue", that his mother bought from Cole. Cole bought the guitar new from David Margen of the band Santana. Cole gave Armstrong a Bill Lawrence Humbucking pickup and told him to install the pickup in the bridge position. Armstrong then switched back to a Seymour Duncan JB pickup that he still uses today. "Armstrong fetishized his teacher's guitar, partly because the blue instrument had a sound quality and Van Halen - worthy fluidity he couldn't get from his little red Hohner. He prized it mostly, however, because of his relationship with Cole, another father figure after the death of Andy."
Read more about this topic: George Cole (musician)
Famous quotes containing the words guitar and/or instructor:
“Swiftly in the nights,
In the porches of Key West,
Behind the bougainvilleas
After the guitar is asleep,
Lasciviously as the wind,
You come tormenting.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)