They say that when you point the finger, three fingers point back at you. And that's very true here, because I'm an online guitar teacher telling you to be careful of online guitar teachers.
But I think it's worth saying. A lot of guitar videos and courses suggest you're about to discover the one thing that's been holding you back. Some of that is useful. Some of it isn't. So here's why I think you should be a bit sceptical of what you see online, and more importantly, what to actually do about it so you become a more independent learner.
Teachers who sell something benefit from you feeling incomplete ▶ 0:42
Any guitar teacher online who's selling something stands to benefit from making you believe you're missing something. A missing piece of knowledge, or something about how you do things that one video or one course would fix.
Now, they may well know something you don't. If they're a good player, they probably do, and there might be a perfectly good reason to pay for that. I title my own videos with a bit of intrigue sometimes. But I like to think that once you're in, I'm not hiding anything from you. And if you don't practise it, it doesn't really matter whether you know what I'm showing you or not.
Quite often I'll watch a guitar lesson promising some hidden fix, to get ideas for my own teaching, and I get to the end and think either "I don't really know what you've taught me" or "I already knew that". If someone claims economy picking is the missing piece, well, that's a pretty well-known technique.
Some people just learn more slowly, and that's fine ▶ 2:47
I've been teaching guitar for a long time. Some people pick the instrument up phenomenally quickly, even without a musical background. Some pick it up a lot slower. Nobody wants to think they're the slower one, but statistically, it's going to be some of you.
And I think there's something quite insidious about telling those people they're just missing this technique or that one. You can give a slower learner all the right techniques and it's still going to take them more time. So they end up buying course after course. Those courses are probably still useful, but they're not going to suddenly transform anyone's playing.
A good player isn't always a good teacher ▶ 3:53
If you compare the skills you need for good playing and good teaching, there's very little crossover. You could sit for hours and get phenomenally good, and still be awful at communicating. You might lack the skill of watching someone else play, putting yourself in their shoes, and understanding how they process new information.
So if you want to learn how your favourite player does something specific, go to the source. But for general pointers on how to play the instrument, they might not be the best person to ask.
What worked for them isn't the only way ▶ 4:42
A lot of guitarists seem to think the thing that got them to their level must be the right way of doing things. That's where many of these "this is what's stopping you" videos come from.
I'm a big believer that time on the fretboard is the most important thing. Technique matters, because it saves you from figuring everything out through loads of trial and error. But without the time on the fretboard, it doesn't matter what techniques you know.
Think of players with odd, janky habits: holding the pick in a strange way like Marty Friedman, or not using their little finger. If they told you that's why they can play fast, you'd probably think that doesn't seem right. The same goes for more normal advice. I'm an advocate of economy picking. It suits me and I learnt it early on. But there are players who purely alternate pick and play faster than me. What does that tell you? In my opinion, that time on the fretboard is king.
And even if nine out of ten lessons online were good, you'd still hit one in every ten that doesn't suit you, doesn't click with your brain, or contradicts the last one you watched. That's how people end up stagnating. So the important thing is knowing how to process the information.
Step one: rule out practice time as the problem ▶ 6:25
If you're stuck with a technique, a song, anything, and you practise for less than an hour a day, try this. For the next two to four weeks, practise for an average of an hour to an hour and a half a day, maybe even two hours.
You don't have to do it forever, and you don't have to do it right now if you've got a busy month. The point is to make sure time on the fretboard isn't the limiting factor. If it is, the best thing you can do is stop watching lessons and just play more.
It needs to be an unbroken hour, too. Not an hour of checking your phone, going to the toilet and making a coffee. That very quickly becomes half an hour. A practice log helps you be honest about it.
If you're still not making progress after that stint, which I find very unlikely, then start thinking about technique. Or better, think about technique while you're putting that time in. If you're practising for two hours, that justifies looking at how you're doing things. If you only play for ten minutes a day and spend all of it thinking about your pick angle, you'll barely get any practice done.
And if you find you can only manage 20 or 30 minutes a day, that's fine. If the extra time during that stint helped, you know you're on the right track. You just accept progress will be a bit slower, and you don't need to worry about technique videos quite so much.
How to test any new idea you see online ▶ 8:42
Explore the extremes. If someone tells you to pause longer between phrases when you improvise, don't just pause for a beat or two. Pause for two bars. Leave so much space you think there's no way it'll sound good. Then try the other end: just an eighth note between phrases. You might find that, because of how you play, a tiny breath of silence is all you need.
The same goes for everything else. If it's picking dynamics, go from really gentle to really hard and see where in that range you want your playing to sit. If it's slanting the pick, really angle it, turn your hand all the way, and see how far you actually need to go. Most of us aren't as good as we'd like to be at judging how far to take an idea, and the only way to find out is to try both ends.
Treat it as a potential idea, not an instruction. Just try it. In two weeks you'll find a video of someone saying the exact opposite. I've probably contradicted myself on my own channel a million times. You don't have to treat something as gospel just because you half-trust the person saying it.
Practise slow, then practise fast ▶ 10:09
When you're learning a new idea, practise it very slowly. So slowly you can talk yourself through it and say out loud everything you're doing. That's when your conscious brain is actually active.
Once you've done that careful practice and it feels like it's in your muscle memory, practise fast. Don't mess around at a medium speed. Really push it and see where you can take it. Keep those two things separate. A metronome makes it easy to be clear about which one you're doing.
Ask what you actually "need" to do ▶ 10:45
In my opinion, guitar playing is the goal itself. Unless you're aiming to play live, go professional, or you need guitar for something specific, like a producer who wants more guitar in their tracks, you don't really have an end goal you're chasing.
So when a video tells you that you need to learn this to play faster, ask: why do I need to do that? Need is the key word. If you enjoy playing, all you need to do is pick the guitar up and play it. Yes, you'll enjoy getting better, but it's a never-ending game. You keep improving, you try new things, your style changes, and that's kind of the point.
Need to learn it for what? It's an important question to ask, I think.
So here's the plan. Commit to two to four weeks of an unbroken hour or more each day. Next time you pick something up from a lesson, mine included, try it at both extremes before deciding how much of it you want. Then go and play.
