A Helena man has been quietly changing youngsters' lives, introducing kids to music and performance.

The Queen City is home to a number of guitar teachers, and Mark Forbes has earned a reputation as one of the best.

"He teaches in a real positive environment," said parent Wendy Williams. "The kids are becoming performers rather than just musicians.

"He just a ... golden person, that's what he is," she added.

Forbes has taught scores of children how to play the guitar over the last decade. The self-taught musician began giving lessons to his friends about 35 years ago. Later, those folks begged him to teach their children, and Forbes found a new niche.

Williams' son, Jace, was born with a severe hearing impairment. When he wanted to learn how to play the guitar, she had her doubts. But Jace has blossomed under Forbes' tutelage, Williams said.

"Mark just treats Jace like any other student, and has the same expectations," she said.

"The guitar thing has really been huge for him," she added. "It's his own thing that he can excel at."

Forbes said Jace has grown with the instrument and is developing as a singer.

"Oftentimes I even forget he has that," Forbes said. "When he locks onto a melody, he sings quite well."

Forbes' father taught him to play the accordion while he was growing up. Forbes didn't play much music until he found himself on destroyers and river boats during the Vietnam conflict.

He started to tinker with the instrument, buying $50 guitars to keep him busy during the occasional break in the action.

"I didn't expect to stick with this at all," Forbes said. But once he returned home, he realized something was missing.

"I don't have a guitar, and I need to fix that," he recalled thinking.

He exposes his students to numerous songs from the 1960s and 1970s, but he's open to teaching them newer riffs. He spends the first half of the hourlong session reviewing the kids' book lessons for the week before opening it up and letting them rock.

"That's the big thing," he said. "Don't just keep them in the book only. They'll bail real quickly."

Forbes has found adults tend to drop the guitar more easily -- he's had kids stick with the lessons for years. As the youths find a love of music, they often spend their Friday nights picking strings, Forbes said.

"It's incredible, just incredible," Jane Andriolo said. Her son Cole began taking lessons almost three years ago. "He can't stop. He'll sit and play until 1 or 2 in the morning sometimes. He definitely has that passion."

Forbes starts off teaching students simple chords and showing them how to turn the varying finger placements into songs.

"He just goes through it really slow and easy and shows me how to do it," Cole Andriolo said.

Forbes watches his students grow from children to high-school graduates. And sometimes former students call him while they're in Helena, asking for an impromptu jam.

Forbes sets up performances for his current students at the FireTower Coffee House a few times a year, and sometimes the kids play in front of large crowds at community fundraisers.

"It makes me feel real good to see them in front of 1,000 people, when their feet barely touch the floor in the chair they're sitting in," Forbes said.

Jace Williams and his younger brother, Witt, perform at the coffeehouse gigs and sometimes play at the Saturday Farmer's Market.

"It's a little different when you have to get up in front of whoever walks into the coffee shop," Wendy Williams said. "His students get up and do just a wonderful job."

About half the kids choose acoustic guitars and the other half prefer electric axes, Forbes said. More girls than boys play acoustic, he said.

Many hit songs are relatively simple constructions with easy chords, he said. An example is Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven."

"That song used many basic chords, and look how much money they made," he said. "And it's a beautiful song."

Seated in his living room during a recent interview, Forbes reached for his guitar to demonstrate his point. Strumming through simple chord changes, he moved from America's "A Horse with No Name" to Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water."

"If you know A, B, C, D, E, F and G, you can play thousands of songs," Forbes said.

Forbes, who's got 14 students now, occasionally takes on new charges, at a cost of $50 per month, for four hourlong lessons. He said lists of local music teachers are available at Clark Music and Piccolo's Music.