Jake Willson is a composer and guitarist whose music sits at the intersection of contemporary prog, fusion, and classical writing — think Plini, Steven Wilson, and Dream Theater, but filtered through a PhD in classical composition and years of performing and recording original material. In this live masterclass from the December 2021 GuitarVivo Modern Guitar Summit, Jake talks candidly about what he has learned about the creative process, what has worked, and what has not.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: Jake shares the intellectual and emotional journey that shaped his compositional voice — from early jazz studies and a Napster-era musical education to his PhD and the anxiety of trying to be original when all of musical history is a playlist away. You will come away with a more honest and practical understanding of what the creative process actually involves.
How Jake became a composer
Jake started playing guitar around age twelve, growing up surrounded by music shops in a musical family, which gave him an unusually smooth path into serious practice. He describes the early years of his playing as a beautiful, nostalgic period of almost obsessive practice — staying up impossibly late, guitar always in hand, watching nonsense television but always playing. He discovered jazz and became fascinated by its harmonic world, then won a scholarship to Berklee, where he found that while the harmony excited him, the life of a jazz musician as such was not what he wanted to dedicate himself to. What really gripped him was the composition side of jazz — the subtle, emotional harmonic moves that set it apart from rock and pop.
From Berklee to a PhD in classical composition
Jake’s path from Berklee led him to Surrey University, where he went as deep into classical music as he could go, eventually completing a PhD in classical composition. He describes the PhD as a genuinely playful process — one that allowed him to zoom out from individual ideas and think about a piece of music as a complete, coherent statement. This was a crucial development: as a younger writer, he felt he could generate compelling ideas but struggled to connect them into a unified musical argument. The PhD gave him the analytical tools to work at the level of the whole piece. He also found that his jazz background gave him a significant advantage over his classical contemporaries — he could do the mental arithmetic with harmony quickly, hearing and reaching the notes he wanted without having to work it all out on paper first.
“The PhD thing was really important in my development. Jazz was a way for me to understand harmony quickly. And I think that put me at a big advantage over my classical contemporaries because they weren’t able to do that kind of mental arithmetic with notes, with harmony.”
The anxiety of originality
One of the most candid and useful parts of Jake’s talk is his discussion of originality — specifically, the anxiety that comes from having all of musical history available on a streaming platform. He traces the story from Bach and Mozart, where innovation was slow and stylistic continuity was the norm, through the radical upheavals of the early 20th century (Mahler, Strauss, two World Wars, modernism), to the post-war rise of jazz and popular music. The electric guitar as a symbol of freedom and rebellion, Jimi Hendrix and Woodstock — all of this builds to the present moment, where Spotify has flattened musical history into a single infinite playlist. The notion of originality has become both harder to achieve and, Jake suggests, possibly a damaging idea to fixate on.
What actually works in the creative process
Jake is deliberate about sharing practical lessons from his own experience — things that have worked, and things that have not. Growing up listening voraciously (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Frank Zappa, classical music, jazz, Limewire and Napster and eventually iPods) gave him enormous ears and a wide harmonic vocabulary. The PhD gave him structural discipline. Playing guitar with its physical constraints — limited voicings compared to piano — forced him to think creatively about harmony in a way that he believes gives guitarists a strange advantage as composers. The tension between those big ears, that structural thinking, and the guitar’s limitations is, for Jake, exactly where the interesting music lives.
To find out more about Jake Willson, visit https://linktr.ee/jakewillson
Taking it further: Jake’s musical world — contemporary guitar composition in the vein of Plini, Steven Wilson, and Dream Theater — is a rich area to explore if you want to develop as both a player and a composer. His recommendation to analyse how classical masters structured complete musical statements (not just individual passages) is worth taking seriously. Listen to Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report not just for the notes but for how the compositions are built and how sections connect. Jake also recommends keeping composition and analysis as separate but parallel disciplines.