We all know the old saying "Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day. Teach a man to catch fish and you feed him for a lifetime".
What's this got to do with learning to playing guitar? I was just looking at some of the other top ranked guitar lesson sites on the web and I realized that they're just "giving you a fish". Each short lesson just shows you one song ... or one riff ... or one concept ... or one finger trick. I guess you can try to learn to play guitar that way but it's gonna' take forever and you may never really wind up with a holistic, integrated vision of music ... at least not one that will allow you to do the really fun and creative stuff like songwriting and improvising.
Remember ... MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE. The guitar is just the TOOL you use to EXPRESS that language. All along I've been saying that you can't really learn to play guitar one little "sound bite" at a time. That's why we developed our Absolutely Understand Guitar course the way we did. Each DVD video guitar lesson is an hour long and TOTALLY covers a particular guitar theory subject. Our 32 video guitar lessons are also designed to be viewed in a strict order so that each concept flows into the next providing a total picture of how the entire language works. This is how you "teach a man to catch fish" in the world of guitar.
If you have that fundamental understanding of the language, you'll figure out all the details for yourself. You don't need all these dumb little video clip lessons. In fact, you'll find that they're counter productive ... giving you the impression that if you learn enough of these little finger tricks, you're somehow going to become a real musician. YEAH ... RIGHT!
Another benefit is that once you understand the language of music, you find that all these different STYLES of guitar are really much more similar than they are dissimilar. You'll realize that Country guitar ain't all that different from Metal guitar. You can believe me now or believe me later.
I also realized that a lot of these other instructors don't have "The BIG Picture" themselves. That's why they try to teach the way they do. I was watching some of these video clips and they were so full of misinformation that I was truly appalled! I saw guys routinely demonstrating techniques and concepts that were flat-out totally wrong and misleading.
I feel fortunate that I had the awesome instructors that I had ... the guys that got me to see the total picture. Chief among them was my late dear friend Dick Wetmore ... the legendary Jazz Violinist. He could play ANYTHING. You could hear that he was SPEAKING through his instrument every time he played. He's the one who taught me the relationship between THEORY and EAR TRAINING that leads to true musicianship. These are the lessons I hope to pass on to my students.
Another reason they produce these little video clip guitar lessons is that web video is still so primitive and audio/video files are so big that it isn't POSSIBLE to provide long video guitar lessons online and still maintain good image quality and resolution. That's why we're still sticking to DVD at this point. Our hour-long DVD guitar lessons have excellent video and audio quality. That's also why our lessons can be a little more expensive as well. It takes a lot of time and effort to create a course this well designed and produced.
So here's what I say ... "Teach a man a song and all he knows is that song. Teach a man how the language of music WORKS and he can figure out how to play any song he wants for the rest of his life".
And that ain't no fish story ...
All the best, Scotty West
Comments