an informal guitar group making music in south east hants

our story

Our Director
Workshop's Director - Derek Hasted - is well-known locally as a guitar teacher, and also known throughout the guitar world both as a composer/arranger and for his work with the Hampshire Guitar Orchestra (hago).

Our Birth Derek founded the Guitar Workshop in 1988 to complement his Adult Education classes and to provide guitarists with the opportunities for music making and friendship that orchestral instrumentalists enjoy. Our Music The Workshop Collection has over 150 accessible trios, quartets and quintets - a musically interesting and varied mix of easy and intermediate lines that we usually play at sight. In fact about 7500 sheets of paper come to our get-togethers! Half our pieces are for Guitar Ensemble; the remainder are traditional tunes and folk songs which we pluck or strum. Although most bring a Classical Guitar, some also bring a Folk Guitar and mix and match during the evening.

Pictured : Workshop December 1999

Our Concerts
Starting in 1989, we have put on an informal Concert every Christmas, and when Workshop was ten years old, in 1988, we had grown to such a strength that we added a summer Concert too, which included a Souvenir Programme, containing some of the history of Workshop's first 10 years. All our Concerts give their entire proceeds to local charities, and over the years we have raised £39615 for good causes.

Our Sound
Even new visitors to Workshop - and we welcome many each year - find their efforts contribute to a sound which far exceeds what a solo guitar can manage.

Our story continues year on year, and this website came live on 19th September 2004.

Why not come and try Workshop?
You could be part of one of Hampshire's largest, friendliest and most well-established Guitar Groups,