Why I Found Guitar Lessons So Useful

A man playing and learning guitar

There seems to be infinite ways of learning the guitar. Many of them are even free. Through YouTube or online videos. Finding tabs and chord sheets online for your favourite songs and searching the chord shapes. Plus there are endless apps you can use that help to ‘make a game’ out of learning guitar (the bouncy ball method). Of course, there are also books you could use to get started.

I’ve learned a lot of songs from online tabs over the years. If I was starting to learn now I would probably have used YouTube as well. That being said, this is why I found guitar lessons with an actual real life human guitar teacher useful.

I Didn’t Know Why It Was Wrong

I remember when I started I thought my timing was pretty good. Spoiler alert: I was very wrong!

Having a guitar teacher was great for this for a few reasons. The first is she could hear it straight away and could tell me it was something I needed to work on. Secondly, she could tell me exactly HOW to work on it. This alone must have saved countless hours, even weeks or playing guitar horribly out of time. Having this instant feedback really helped.

What Should I Play Now?

So you can play the riff from Smoke on the Water and a few other ‘essentials’. Job done, right? Being a total beginner looking at guitar from a beginners point of view was very limiting. Learn a few chords here, a riff there and then… I had no idea what to do next. Now from my guitar teachers perspective, we had only just started. There was so many more things I could learn, improve on and understand that I just wouldn’t have known about. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

If I was learning now and decided to start by searching YouTube, I’m not sure what I would need to search for. As you will know, YouTube videos are great, but there is no structure or order to them. You can easily end up learning very similar things over and over again, or things that seem so difficult you just skip. Having someone who can see the easiest route to advancing your guitar skills was awesome. It took out all the questioning of ‘what should I learn next?’ and let me focus on what I should have been focused on: learning to play the guitar.

If I Didn’t Understand – No Problem!

We Google everything these days. There is so much information available. The downside – there is so much information available! Where do you start? What is really relevant? Is any of this even correct? Why does this directly contradict what I just read?

Before you know it, you’ve spent hours of your time looking for an answer. Now, you aren’t even sure if you were asking the right question.

Being able to ask someone a question and get a straight answer saved not only time, but stress. It’s so frustrating not being able to find an answer to your question. It’s even more annoying when it’s a forum with people who know the same or less than you throwing in their two cents and acting like they know the answer. Should I use a capo? What is drop D tuning? Should I be using tab or spending time learning manuscript at this point?

My guitar teacher could either answer my question, or explain to me why I wouldn’t understand the answer yet. She would then explain it to me from the ground up, giving me the background knowledge I needed to be able to use the information. Time saved. Stress eliminated. Got a straight answer.

I Was Consistently Challenged

Having a great teacher meant that I wasn’t plateauing and staying at a level all the time. Where I might have become complacent and stopped learning new things, my teacher wouldn’t let me. This helped to push my skills much further than I would have had the determination to achieve on my own. It was good to have someone encourage you when you found it difficult. A teacher that breaks things down when you just don’t get it and also finding the next thing for you to work on so you didn’t have to was incredibly useful. A great teacher will often push you out of your comfort zone, but just enough that you can see that it is achievable and not overwhelming. This was especially helpful when I started to take my guitar grades.

My Lessons Were Just More Fun Than Learning On My Own

To me, music has always been about playing with other people. It is much more of a social activity than a solitary one. While you definitely need to practice away from your lessons, I would tend to be more focused and we would practice the parts I found difficult much more in my lesson. I had more patience for it as my guitar teacher would be helping me along, either with words of encouragement or tips that I hadn’t thought of on my own. While I would have likely got frustrated trying to play along with a YouTube video and tell myself ‘I’ll come back to it another time’, only to loose it to the depths of the YouTube archive, the lesson time would fly by and I would get better.

Regular Lessons Kept Me Accountable As I Didn’t Want To Look Stupid

A self indulgent reason? Maybe. But having regular lessons meant that by the next lesson, I felt I should have progressed. Even if that progression was minimal. If I hadn’t progressed, I at least wanted to be able to ask a question or two about why I was finding it so difficult! If I hadn’t had regular lessons, days and even weeks could have easily slipped by in between practice sessions. Not necessarily because I would have wanted it to be that way, but things always seem to pile up and get in the way. Having lessons that I had to get to and spend time at meant I had already carved out time in my week for my guitar playing. This made a huge difference to my progress.

Conclusion

While I’m sure it is possible to learn guitar on your own, for me at least, I wouldn’t have wanted to learn that way. The input and guidance from someone who had already been through it wasn’t only encourging but also kept me on track and sped the whole process up. It also ensured that I stuck to the plan rather than meandering through online tutorials and getting side tracked by things that just weren’t relevant to me at that stage (like worrying about learning modes before being able to even play a few barre chords). I’m glad I stuck with my lessons.

Read how Gary went from knowing nothing about the guitar to being able to jam with other musicians and play his favourite songs after dreaming about it for half of his life >>

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