Guitar Lessons

Guitar Lessons

So to put you in the loop, I am learning to play guitar, I started off  flicking around on the internet, YouTube and some of the other million sites that show you the basics of guitar chord shapes, basic rhythm and the such like.

I found some real gems along the way such as justinguitar.com who has a great structured free course, practice guidance and dexterity exercises, i highly reccomend donating to his sight or buying some of his stuff just to keep the things he does free. I also found a couple of cool guys on YouTube who broke down some songs and lessons into idiot proof videos that also added to my playing knowledge. I tend to only focus on a couple of YouTube teachers.


First one I came across was Marty Schwartz, he just seems to be a really chilled guy that is rather surprised he made it big on YouTube but his lessons are informative and fun and he is a very cool guitar player, he likes to encourage adding extra embellishments to funk things up which I like, he also does some really easy to learn songs for beginners which I have poured over..does every new guitar player just wanna play a song straight out the box?...."what I've gotta learn chords and stuff and my hands will hurt?????....."Anyway go here to find Marty's Lessons and Marty's Songs. 


My second YouTube teacher is Erich Andreas, I came across this dude whilst looking for songs to play on my Ukulele and he was, and still is, known as yourukesage, he is a really funny guy who talks about guitar  ninjas and knows heaps about playing the uke (more on my uke prowess in a later blog). Anyhoo I found out that Erich also has a heap of videos on YouTube as yourguitarsage and teaches you loads whilst being laugh out loud funny. He he is as YourGuitarSage.

I finally decided that as much as there are some great online teachers out there, I was strugging with it being a one way exercise. The whole process lacked feedback, and there was too much room for bad habits. I then noticed that one of my twitter followers was having an experiment with online tuition via skype which sounded like a cool idea, lessons in my own home in front of a webcam with some actual real guitarist feedback.

we sat and had an initial skype chat for and went through some basics and although the skype idea was a cool concept, and even having super fast internet speeds here, the strumming wasn't clear and the finger placements where not that clear. I decided I needed a local guitar teacher.

After much scouring of the internet for teachers, i ended up on the RGT website, and after popping in my postcode found one close by for a reasonable price who taught acoustic guitar lessons, he is a registered tutor, and used to be a RGT examiner so kinda knows his stuff. There is nothing like face to face tuition for me and it forms one of the best parts of my week.

Find a guitar teacher here