Guitar-less in London

This is the first ever blog I’ve ever written, so go easy on me. It’s the story of how I arrived in London to major in classical guitar at the Royal College of Music (RCM); without a guitar.

Let’s go back a year exactly.  In July 2019, I had just finished high school in Beirut, and I’d moved to Yerevan, Armenia, to further my musical studies at the State Conservatory. I was using a cheap instrument which seemed to “do the job” for the time being. But with the financial collapse of my country of birth, Lebanon, in October of the same year, all hope for a new guitar were out the window. For reasons beyond my control at the time, I wasn’t able to travel to London to audition for the RCM. That was probably for the best, because there was no way I would’ve gotten in with a guitar like that. Fast-forward to fall of 2020 when after months of intense hard work and a few hundred emails later, I had managed to gather enough scholarships to fund my studies at the RCM.

One problem remained, however... I still didn’t have an appropriate guitar; and one would assume that’s the bare minimum for any classical guitar student in such a prestigious school. And rightly so! I figured I would take my old, cheap guitar with me to London and use it until some guitar collector/enthusiast would hear me play and lend me a proper instrument. Things wouldn’t turn out that way, however. After many heated discussions and failed attempts with the airline company trying to get my guitar on board, I had run out of ideas. On the 17th of November, 2020, I arrived in Heathrow Airport with one large suitcase and a cabin bag; but no guitar. I wasn’t sure whether it was really funny or really sad that I was trying to convince the border control officer that I had come to London to study classical guitar at the RCM when I clearly had no instrument with me.

COVID being the icing on the cake at this point, I met my first colleague at the RCM more than two weeks after arriving in London. He was kind enough to offer his uncle’s Yamaha guitar on which I had my first ever lesson with my dear professor, Gary Ryan. I was then able to borrow a slightly better, but still quite an amateur guitar from the London Guitar Studio which I used for another month or so. After that, by complete chance, I came across a rguitar in the RCM Instrument Storage Room that had been sitting there since my first visit to college. After some research and a few emails, it turned our that it belonged to one of the guitar professors at the Royal College of Music, Professor Carlos Bonell. What Carlos did is probably one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me in my entire life. Having never met the man in person back then, when he heard that I didn’t have a proper guitar to practice on, he ever so kindly lent it to me. He himself was stuck outside the UK at that time because of Covid and was quarantining at his home in Spain. It was a beautiful guitar by a Spanish luthier called Arcadio Marin; one that I really got to grow with both as a person and more so as a musician.

I got to use that guitar for almost a year and a half. Halfway through that period, I applied for the Instrument Purchase Grant organized by the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) which would help me towards a new instrument of my own. At the time, I was particularly attracted to Stephen Hill guitars of which I had heard a few examples of and had completely fallen in love with. That, however, cost four times what the RPS was offering me. Being a firm believer of the motto: “bite more than you can chew, worry about it later”, I went ahead with ordering the guitar. Months passed, the guitar was halfway through it’s construction and I bearly had a quarter of it’s price. With the financial crises back home worsening even more, asking the family for help definitely wasn’t an option. This took me back to when I was trying to find support to afford my studies in London. Similarly to that, this came with an abundance of rejections. I had attempted to get in touch with people who had helped me in the past to help me buy an instrument as well, but I wasn’t successful. Nearly out of hope, I got an unpaid gig; I was asked to open an event for the Armenian Community Council in the UK. If you know me, you’d know that I had to shoot my shot. I got in touch with the organizers beforehand and explained the situation I was in. My point of contact was the Chairman of the organization, Mr. Rafi Sarkissian, who was very empathetic and vowed to do everything he could to help. And surely enough, with his help, a kind lady in the audience (who prefers to remain anonymous) offered to cover the outstanding fees herself. I couldn’t believe it!

A few months later, I received my guitar from Stephen Hill, the guitar maker himself in Gatwick Airport, London. All this was nothing short of a miracle for me, and still remains an utter mystery. As I’m writing this, I’ve had my Stephen Hill Master Model guitar for less than 9 months and I’ve already had more than a dozen performances with it. I’ll remain eternally grateful to everyone in this story and no less to my two professors Gary Ryan and Christopher Stell without whom I wouldn’t have made it through. Take my story as a testimony; anything and everything is possible. Focus on what you really want, and if it’s truly good for you, there’s no way you won’t have it. Embrace life’s challenges, that’s what gives it flavor. Over and out!