I’ve been a guitar teacher for quite a while so when this infernal internet first kicked off you had to actually dial a phone number to get into it and trying to get smooth video was like sucking a golf ball down a hosepipe so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Then, as the years rolled on and YouTube got bigger, I saw guitar teachers appearing everywhere, all touting their wares, and I started to get slightly concerned and saw a future for myself stacking shelves at Aldi.

But now I chuckle at my naivety, because there’s just so damn much of the stuff, thousands upon thousands of guitar lessons, all of varying quality, often saying contradictory things.

Where the hell do you start?

The problem isn’t lack of information

For most aspiring guitarists, access to information is no longer the problem, now you’ve got more information available for free than any previous generation of musicians could possibly have imagined, the problem is knowing which information you need, in what order, and what to do with it once you’ve got it.

You can watch a video about the pentatonic scale, another about modes, another about alternate picking, three about the CAGED system, one promising to unlock the entire fretboard in ten minutes and another explaining why everything in the previous five videos was wrong. You’ve learnt lots of things, but have you actually become a better guitarist?

Collecting lessons isn’t the same as learning

Watching somebody explain something can give you the very satisfying feeling that you’ve learnt it but unfortunately, understanding something while somebody demonstrates it and being able to use it yourself are two completely different things.

Real learning requires you to take an idea, practise it properly, connect it to things you already know and eventually use it in actual music, that bit isn’t quite as exciting as clicking on another video entitled THE ONE SCALE SHAPE EVERY GUITARIST MUST KNOW!, but it’s where most of the progress happens.

The missing ingredient is direction

The difficulty for a new or developing guitarist is that you don’t yet know what you don’t know, whereas with experience, it’s relatively easy to look at a lesson and decide whether it’s useful, whether it applies to what you’re trying to do and how it connects with everything else. Precisely the experience a beginner doesn’t have yet.

A good teacher isn’t there simply to provide information, the internet already does that extraordinarily well, the useful skill is identifying what you need next, spotting the things that are actually holding you back, correcting problems before they become habits and putting everything into some sort of sensible order.

YouTube is brilliant

None of this means I think YouTube guitar lessons are bad, quite the opposite because there’s an astonishing amount of excellent teaching material available, much of it completely free. I use the internet constantly myself, but it’s much more useful when you actually know what you’re looking for.

Used properly, online videos can be a fantastic resource alongside lessons and practice but used randomly, they can leave you knowing a little bit about an enormous number of things without being particularly good at any of them.

So what is the aspiring guitarist supposed to do?

Well, give me a ring, obviously.

07484 232 916

‘It was like that when I found it dude.’

-Bart Simpson.