The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

About seven out of every ten persons who schedule their first guitar lesson tell me something similar. "I'm starting almost completely from nothing. I hope you don't mind beginners. I bought this guitar about two months ago. I bought a book to go with my guitar, but I found it boring after about a week or so. At some point, I looked on the web for easy, beginner, guitar stuff to learn. You know, online guitar lessons. I got pretty frustrated about the lack of anything decent on the web. I realized that there was nothing that was going to help me except finding a teacher. Then I found you." What's interesting to me, as a teacher, is that neither book nor internet helped these people learn. Sure, it was a fun way to jump into guitar, but neither method yielded the results these folks were looking to achieve in terms of progress. It's interesting too to see that this person really wanted to learn, so they bought a guitar and a book. No fault there. The book they got was boring, so they tried Google and YouTube. No fault here either, as there is also great information to be had there as well. But neither source gave them what they were ultimately looking for-progress and skill. Perhaps it's at this point that we all realize we want to learn, and that we need a teacher. That's pretty telling. What fascinated me is this: Why, with all the technology that we have today-the systems, and the approaches-can we not teach guitar remotely?

There are lots of possible reasons why any of these learners get frustrated about learning via books or the web. Much of what is found on the web for guitar education is, well, sub-par. The results? Any disorganized presentation of curriculum is annoying. A philosophy behind why a certain concept is required might be inadequate and flawed. The excercises might be way above or below skill level. There could be huge gaps of ability, resulting in huge barriers that the learner has to recover from. There could be too much information to soak in. The curriculum might not be flexible to meet the needs of the learner. The learner might not be interested in what is being offered. There are a whole host of reasons.

Still, there are thousands of online guitar lesson sites out there. To the guitar teacher, the medium of online guitar lessons has got to seem pretty tempting. "Hey, I'll just systemize what has worked in the past and present in my face-to-face lessons online, somehow. Then, I can replicate this very same lesson four hundred times without breaking a sweat, and make a fortune!"

There is one major flaw: If the teacher is removed from the picture, the commitment to learning is removed as well.

Commitment, Online.

Anyone who used to get online with a dial-up modem back in the glory days of the internet understood that there was a lot of potential for doing something you weren't really allowed to do normally. One could do something without deference to social norms and have no fear of reprimand from a boss, co-worker, spouse, or friend. Anyone who explored the internet in those days understood that having that ability to walk away from any interaction was intregral to why they were there in the first place. To services like AOL or even CompuServe (remember them, anybody?), being anonymous was a major selling point of the experience.

AOL's commercial featuring David Cross hits the idea brilliantly:

When a person is anonymous, they are not accountable for their actions. Being unaccountable for their actions, they could leave at anytime if they violated the norms of whatever service they were taking part in. They could delete an account and start fresh, or just simply leave a chat-room. Although they valued the ability to get online and go search out these services, they were not obliged to go public with their activities. In my own brutal way of saying it, they were uncommitted.

The internet still seems like a place where identity is incredibly vague. I do not want to give the impression that I believe that this is bad. The web is still ripe for random anonymous net surfing opportunities, within reason. There are ample chances to be really, really stupid to other people and still get away with it. We can always walk away, unscathed. It's the same for online guitar lessons. We can still navigate away from a site if it isn't to our liking. If a person tries them out and they don't work (please remember that 70% of the people who come into guitar lessons with me had tried online and then promptly gave up), they won't feel bad for leaving the site. If the lessons were bad, then there's no reason to stay.

The game changes dramatically once a person walks into a guitar lesson, however. They are no longer anonymous and they are now accountable for their actions.

Accountability and Commitment

Many, many people out there may disagree with me on this, but I don't care. Online guitar lessons are completely ineffectual because of one reason: The lack of a professional relationship, a bonding of sorts, between a teacher and student working on something together creates a lack of both accountability and commitment. The teacher is there to help, the student is there to learn, and the professional relationship between the two is what facilitates the process of learning and teaching. There is nothing more. In an ideal teacher/student relationship, both parties feel intensely committed because they both feel accountable for their own actions-both of them affect each other. That's a good reason why I take teaching and learning so seriously. I like people, and I've found that no other excercise out there has made me grow more as a human being than has teaching. I am a life-long learner too. I've often felt that if I had the right reasons to study as well as the right teacher, the one I felt like I could give my heart to, then I could learn what I wanted to learn incredibly fast and well.

The larger the proximity between teacher and student (i.e. emotional distance, as with systemized online guitar lessons, or video conference lessons), the less chance for a professional relationship. The less chance for a professional relationship, the less the commitment. The less the commitment, the less the accountability. The less the accountability (in learning guitar at least), the less chance for fun to happen. In order to learn, we need to be ready to commit, and that's not always an easy thing to do.

One key failure that online guitar lessons have not been able to escape is that they do not seem to make most challenges beatable. What I mean is that most online guitar lessons do not take into account where the student is coming from and exactly how much to guide them along. Most of these lessons somehow skip a crucial step here and there that would greatly aid in understanding. Worse, they will put pressure on the student to get over it, buckle down, struggle, and learn guitar. This is analagous to being given a 500 page book on anatomy and being told, "You have a test in three days on this. Fail, and you will be thrown off a cliff. Pass, and we give you a different book. It might be Quantum Physics, too. Good luck."

The trick to learning anything is making sure that the information presented to us, as students (and I am absolutely a student as well), is thoughtfully selected and tested in real-time. I am wary of any teacher who tells me to memorize things; If it's not useful then it's a waste of my time and energy! Selectivity is everything. Furthermore, memorizing things makes it hard for each challenge must be commiserate with my ability. I only have so much brain power. In conclusion, the entire set up of the lesson, the presentation of the material, everything, must ultimately help the student learn what it is they need to learn, and no more. Anything more is like cotton candy; Lots of sugar and little substance.

There are many avenues for learning guitar. That much is obvious! With YouTube and Google, the plethora of online guitar lessons is pretty staggering. I get a little overwhelmed by all the choices there are. For this blog post, I want to take a closer look at YouTube and how it could possibly help a person who is starting to learn guitar from scratch. I think there are advantages to using it, but I think there is a really good way to approach learning from YouTube that can be most beneficial.

Before I get into that, I want to write about YouTube's advantages and disadvantages.

YouTube: Sometimes It's Worth It.

YouTube has a fantastic wealth of videos, showing you everything from a C Chord to playing fast shred licks. The variety of the lessons is staggering. You can find just about everything. What this means is that you can find a simple video on how to learn a specific scale that might ordinarily not be found. Chances are, some person out there took the time to set up their MacBook, shot a video how to play it, and then uploaded it. It's pretty cool. It's definitely a "let's democratize the tools and see what happens," sort of thing.

There are some guitar teachers who have built a huge YouTube presence. I think that is great. The benefit to following these people is that you get a specific insight into their worldview, how they think that you should or should not play guitar. Of course, you have to make up your own mind, and it's my belief that education is often about connecting the dots between several teachers. It's good none-the-less to get some of these opinions

What YouTube is Not So Good For

I will be blunt: YouTube utterly fails at crucial tasks in education. First, YouTube cannot encourage you or interact with you. Other than the person in the video saying "Hey- if you are doing this, you are doing a good job" there is no way that YouTube can encourage you to keep going, even when the going gets rough (it sometimes does). In addition to this huge limitation, you are on your own when it comes to the next video to check out. Although there are people out there who have built huge YouTube bodies of work, there is no guarantee that their approach will lead you to the destination you want to arrive at.

With YouTube, there is the distinct danger that it will be a scary waste of time and energy. First, there is searching for a video you want. if you find the video, there's the chance it could be utterly ineffective. It might be too hard, not at your skill level. Worse, the instructor on the video might not say why learning a specific concept is good. For example, many teachers insist that learning music theory is a good thing, while personally I am passionately opinionated in saying that it's the student's choice to learn music theory. You might be stuck with someone who is hell-bent on getting you to learn scales, and you couldn't care less.

The nail in the coffin for me is that YouTube doesn't have the highest quality videos. Of course, they are educational videos. They just need to help you learn guitar.  For me, there is something about aesthetics that is lost or forgotton with YouTube. Anyone can do it, including the mediocre. Sure there are good videos out there. Find them! But the bad ones makes the whole experience feel kind of cheap. To me at least, it feels like YouTube's staying power with education is limited because of it's lack of quality video.

How to Use YouTube?

There is one way that I have found that works particularly well when you are using YouTube as a way to learn guitar: Question a concept mercilessly. Ask someone whether or not they agree with what the instructor said. Start a dialogue! This could be a guitar teacher, or a friend who plays. Anyone with experience. Ask them if they learned to play guitar without knowing music theory. The answer might surprise you.

The way I learned guitar was anything but traditional. If I did this all over again, I probably would have searched the internet twice over for answers to my questions. I know that I would feel pretty unfulfilled, as I tend to be the insanely curious type. I guess if YouTube does anything, it's latent function is to feed that curiousity. Enjoy!

Sometimes I shout myself a little hoarse with this whole music theory thing. I really, really, don't think it is appropriate to assume that every single person out there in the world needs to know music theory in order to simply play a chord. I have said it time and time again, and I will continue to for as long as I am involved with music education: Anyone can learn to play the guitar without knowing a shred of music theory.

In a previous post, I stated that about 80% of the people I teach just do not want to learn music theory. The other people do, which of course I happily oblige. The mistake that many guitar teachers make, either in person or online, is that every person must learn music theory to play guitar.

Yuck.

I am basing my rather sharp opinions on the way I learned guitar. I will share: I had no instructors (or online lessons either!). All I had were friends who played and showed me a thing or two, and Van Halen. I wanted lessons. I wanted to learn. I didn't really get the chance until college. By that point, I knew music theory was something I needed to know. After all, it was fun. "Oh- that's why that chord progression sounds cool. Sweet." I heard it, and then I seeked the music theory to back it up. To this day, that is my approach to teaching guitar.

When learning music, it's my opinion that it's better to experience it without complication. The ear needs to hear the music. The body needs to feel rhythm. The fingers need to feel the strings. The muscle memory has to develop. Music just has to be there. Music theory is nice to know if one is curious about it. If someone doesn't want to be taught music theory however, and if they are forced to, then music theory will build a wall right in the middle of the creative spirit. Not fun.

If you absolutely crave learning music theory, it's good to learn it. Do it! But if you don't crave it, simply allow yourself to experience playing music to it's fullest. There is plenty of time later for learning more technical aspects, and it does nobody any good to feel guilty about not knowing music theory until that point.

Relationships are important. People help us and we help others. We stand on our own merely because someone helped us stand in the first place. That's why I say that teaching guitar has just as much to do with the curriculum as it does with having a good professional relationship between teacher and student. As far as I can tell with online guitar instruction, I haven't seen any online course that could possibly substitute for playing music from others or learning from a teacher. Here are two reasons why:

1. It's the teacher's job to create lesson plans that match the student's ability AND to be there to hear their frustration. Frustration in any pursuit is bound to appear. Online lessons give you no one to talk to and no one to encourage you. You are pretty much on your own. If you want to learn guitar on your own with nothing but online lessons to guide you, you have a hell of a hurdle to circumnavigate.
2. Online lessons, as of this writing, cannot conform directly to a person's interests in a direct manner. A teacher, however, can. Want to learn a song? Well, a teacher could show you immediately and tell you what details you, specifically, need to focus on in order to master the song. Google is more likely to throw you a badly written tablature, and YouTube is more likely to give you a poorly produced lesson that pretty much ignores your abilities completely.

I don't bring this up to discourage people from learning online. Learning how to play guitar completely from the aid of Google and YouTube may be possible, but online lessons have a place. It's just that the amount of effort people put into online lessons can have twice to three times as much payback if that energy was to be invested into guitar lessons.

Bob Sneider, at the Eastman School of Music, cautioned me once that though he learned a lot in his music classes, the more he played with this old standup bass player the more he learned. Bob learned how to play jazz by playing it with someone who knew it inside and out. Chris Buzzelli, of Bowling Green State University music school, maintains that in order to get good time and rhythm, one has to play with other musicians who have them. Nick Goluses, at the Eastman School of Music, get's right to the point with each graduate student he teaches. He makes each of them learn a concerto, which is a really difficult piece that shows off your technical prowess. Most concertos have orchestral accompaniment. Talk about pressure! He also asks them to learn the Concerto de Aranjuez in their doctoral studies. Not an easy piece of music. His point is that a guitarist changes once they play with an orchestra. His point is that after guitarists learn concertos and play them in a concert, they are playing for an auditorium and symphony hall wherever they go. They project confidence and sound.

Playing with others, outside of our little bubbles, is exactly what it takes to learn guitar. Whether it's a concerto, jazz, Beatles songs, or strait noise, we learn by doing. It's important to understand that no amount of online lessons alone will give you everything you need to play guitar, ever. No one learns in a bubble.

Instead, look to online lessons as a way to learn something new when you are already into guitar. It's more fun to learn new things once you have a certain skill set mastered. Use those lessons as a supplement, and there is less chance for frustration sidelining the entire approach.

We have trained ourselves to see through bad marketing easily. Sometimes I think that "best practice" has been relegated to hoodwinking the customer into buying the product first, and then finding out if it's any good. This is unfortunately the case for guitar lessons. After all, the person searching just has to take the leap of faith and see if the teacher is good for them or not.

I think one of the reasons why people can see through marketing so easily is because the product is empty of meaning in the first place. If the product or service isn't remarkable enough, so we might naturally ignore the the marketing and advertising completely. As Seth Godin so eloquently describes in his wonderful book "The Purple Cow," if a product is not remarkable, then how could it possibly do well?

This brings me to a weird spot in my pursuits. I will be launching an online guitar lesson app sometime in the next month or two. My questions have been nothing short of "How do I make this so remarkable that anyone who tries it out tells others about it because it is so cool?" Friends and colleagues have been supportive, but also cautious with their words. I know I have a long haul to get to that point, but am ready to put the hours in. Just as long as it's nothing short of the most kick ass online guitar lesson anyone can find, I will be happy.

This was quite a babbling blog entry. Thanks for reading.