Why Take Guitar Lessons When I can Learn Online?
Why on earth would I ever want to take guitar lessons when I can just learn online for free off of you tube or pay for that ultimate guitar app or yousician? You make an interesting point, and I have to give the devil his due. There are some really great resources online and some of the apps have come a long way. They can be a great tool to get you started! I mean yousician is really fun, and it gets you started! Youtube has a vast variety of song instruction and music theory, and that ultimate guitar app basically has every tab that you could ever want! Why on earth would you take guitar lessons?
Hopefully if you are reading this right now you are smart enough to know that learning just off of Youtube and yousician can only get you to a certain point. You also realize that there is no one their in real time to show you the mistakes you could be making, if there is anything wrong with your technique, if your timing is off, if you playing with the right part of your finger, is you thumb in the right spot, are you using the right fingers to play that chord, Is there another way you can play this, is it the correct way?
I could go on and on about all of the things you could be missing but not taking some lessons but I want to get to the cold hard facts about why you should take guitar lessons other than just learning solely off of online and apps.
There is no real time feedback
As I mentioned above that when you are going out there and learning on your own though online resources and app, then you have no one there to correct any bad habits or to see if there are any fallacies on your own presumptions you have about learning guitar. In fact just taking lessons for a few months could save you years of headaches in fixing bad habits and bad techniques. Fortunately I was not 100 percent self taught, because if I was I would have made a lot of mistakes and would have tried applying principles in other industries that I understood into and an industry I don’t. Sure, some of the same old rules still apply, but which ones?
The reason I just stated above should be enough to motivate you to at least take a few lessons if you have not already, but lets go a little bit deeper. We are going to go into some more advanced fields now, but let me just say this once before I continue. If you are a beginner guitar player. Meaning that you have less than 6 months, to 1-2 years of experience. I am going to highly recommend that you seek out a teacher to make sure that you have no bad habits and if you do that you fix them now before they become a real issue later.
If you still are not going to seek out a teacher, because you can not afford it, or you do not have the time, then I am going to advise you to start taking a look at your technique. Below are a few things to look out for
- Your hand positioning
- Is you thumb positioning
- Your wrist positioning.
- How are you holding the pick
- How are you playing with you fingers
- What fingers should you or shouldn’t you be using
- Are you practicing laying down?
- are you practicing resting your arm on your leg
- Is your thumb down when you are practicing scales and Arpeggios.
- List goes on and on
Lets Get Into the Advanced Stuff
So if you have made it this far then you now realize the importance of having an actual teacher, coach, mentor, etc. to help you on your journey. One of the biggest issues or traps you can fall into at the intermediate/advance level, to use a metaphor, is know which path to take and which path not to take. This is where you have to get very specific about what you want to accomplish. And using the internet, YouTube, or ultimate guitar might be able to help you a little bit but will not give you the things that your really need.
In my honest opinion, I think that the internet does not show you what you actually need to learn is. One, they do not know what you should learn and it is actually you that needs to figure it out. Two, the information that you really need to start learning is actually very difficult to learn, and I think that the main reason that the truth is so hard to find is that it is often the most difficult challenging material to master.
Are You Curious To Know More?
If you are curious to know more about what this secret information is, then I will give you a hint. If you are at the intermediate stage of your guitar playing… What you need to most be working on is a particular set of scales and a particular set of arpeggios. We would be happy to tell you more but I am 80% confident that you have reached a plateau in your guitar playing and the 2 big things that are going to fix that I just stated above.
And I will tell you this too, the scales set and arpeggios set are very well one of the most difficult and challenging things to master on guitar. It is why you can not find them on the internet and often times can’t find them with 80% of guitar teachers. So please, if you really want to take you guitar playing to the next level, seek out a pro instructor. Someone who really knows their stuff and has been teaching for a while. Because if you don’t you just might find yourself stuck time and time again working on and playing the same things. Schedule a free introductory lesson with us today.