Sonoma County musicians making a living one note at a time

In an 8-square-foot Santa Rosa music studio, Bill Decker has everything he needs to teach you how to shred like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, John Petrucci or, well, Bill Decker, whose trio keeps Sonoma County bars rocking.

His music studio is filled with electric guitars and basses, guitar cables, microphone cables, amplifiers, recording equipment, a drum machine and a music stand.

It also holds a computer station and printer that puts 60,000 songs, 300 note-scale charts and countless music lessons at Decker’s fingertips.

He has been playing guitar since 1968 and teaching since 1986, during that time giving more than 100,000 lessons, a figure he says he can verify through tax statements. Among his students are doctors, court judges and even former Sonoma County Assistant Sheriff Lorenzo Duenas, who learned to play the ukulele.

Decker lives in Windsor but teaches exclusively at Stanroy Music in Santa Rosa, filling nearly every half-hour slot from noon to 9 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday. Until the Great Recession, he taught 111 students a week.

Decker, 57, sports a rocker’s “skullet” - think mullet without the business in the front - and has a quick mind that describes the world of music with precision. He paints versions of that landscape with age-appropriate strokes for students who range from grade-school children to retirees.

“You have to start with small pieces of wood,” he said. “Your system has to be set up for beginners and advanced students. Dumping chords onto a 6-year-old kid is like dumping a wet log on a fire.”

Decker is one of a cadre of musicians in Sonoma County who faithfully teach the next generation how to follow in their footsteps, usually as a way of supporting their own musical passion. He makes a very good living, teaching 80 to 90 students a week and earning about $30 a pop. He won’t give specific income figures, but you can do the math.

Others scrape by with a few dozen students and supplement their income with odd jobs. Still others earn most of their living as performing musicians, either on stage or in recording studios, and teach lessons on the side.

Whether in a garage, a living room or a local music store, private music instructors satisfy parents’ desires to give their children a well-rounded education or, with older students, help resolve deferred dreams and latent longings to play music.

Started at 10

Santa Rosa guitar instructor Ralph Cetola first started playing when he was 10, taking lessons at school and then later begging his parents for private lessons. He was born in the Bronx and still remembers his first small-body Yamaha FG-75 acoustic guitar. He started private lessons at 12 and has never put the instrument down.

“I always want to play guitar. I saw people play on TV, and my dad was into country music,” he said, recalling the sounds of Chet Atkins, Roy Clark and the Beatles.

“Within a few years, I started hearing more of the jam bands, sourthern rock, then Eric Clapton and blues. That was more fuel. I wanted to play like those guys.”

Cetola started teaching others when he turned 18. His motivation was partly self-serving.

“Back then I’d be able to teach people chord progressions and then have them repeat it, playing over and over,” he said. “And I would use that to practice my solos. It was entertaining.”

He still uses that technique. His young students learn a simple bass-line, such as Jimmy Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower,” and he follows along on his own guitar. They repeat the rhythm until the student is locked in. Then Cetola begins to solo, leaving the student to groove alone.

After Cetola came to California in the early 1980s, he found Bennett Friedman’s jazz and jazz improv classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, and in the early 1990s, he studied briefly with Jorma Kaukonen, an original member of Jefferson Airplane.

In 2000, he quit a job at a local manufacturing company to teach music and now has about 15 students a week who pay $25 for 30 minutes of instruction. Seventy percent of his students are kids; his oldest student is learning to play the ukulele at 72.

Cetola says one of the most rewarding things is seeing older students learn something they never thought they could. “It’s not as easy for adults to stick to it because life gets in the way often,” he said.

On one September day, 34-year-old Bob Martin was in Cetola’s garage studio-in-the-making for a lesson. He played a walking bass line up and down the fretboard while a black cat rubbed her cheek against the tuning keys on his bass guitar.

“That’s, that’s a lot of work,” he said after replacing each note with triplets.

Began improvising

Martin never played an instrument until a guitar-strumming friend came to stay with him two years ago. After his first lesson, he wondered if he was wasting his time or if he was too old to learn. Then the puzzle pieces began falling into place. He started playing with others and even improvising, an indescribable accomplishment.

“When I’m in the groove, the closest thing I could describe it as is a mental orgasm,” Martin said. “It’s the coolest thing ever.”

Local music stores often act as a conduit for students and instructors. Stanroy has one of the North Coast’s largest rosters of music teachers, with 15 who rent space for their private lessons.

Music instruction has been a store priority for decades, said co-owner Steve Shirrell, a longtime employee who bought the store last year with another former employee. “There will always be a need for teachers,” he said, because private lessons are free of the politics and budget constraints that plague school music programs.

“There are always going to be parents who will feed their children creativity,” as well as adults who have always wanted to play an instrument.

Mostly performs

Keyboard player Mike Emerson, 47, another Stanroy instructor, gigs more than he teaches. He studied music at Humboldt State and now plays with Petty Theft, a Tom Petty tribute band; Marin singer-songwriter Danny Click; and a fusion blue grass group called Supermule.

He spends about 85 percent of his week playing venues that range from the “stinky club” to festivals with 10,000 to 15,000 participants. He fills the rest of his time with music lessons.

“It’s not as easy as everybody thinks it is,” Emerson said of life as a professional musician. “We have to show up on time, do our homework, get prepared, make sure our passports in order. For the majority of us, we’re the people doing all that. We don’t have managers.”

His payoff comes from the audience members.

“If I’m feeling good, I know they’re feeling good,” he said. “You can see smiles, people coming up to me and talking to me. It’s energy transfer. You feel it, it’s very powerful.”

Giving others that power is also rewarding, Emerson said. “I just like seeing those light bulbs. Facial expressions change... You see the doors open, and there’s a path they can go down that they haven’t thought of before.”

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.