5 Things Online Guitar Lessons Don't Teach you

The pandemic changed a lot of things. More of us work from home, we are all a little more careful about spreading germs and there are far less litter bins in the world (seriously, where have they gone? they used to be everywhere). There was also a marked change in how we learn, particularly in learning guitar. There was an influx of online guitar lessons, courses and apps that were already making headway into the field before 2020 but the covid years certainly cemented their presence in our social feeds. 

As a guitar teacher who had never previously approached online teaching, the pandemic was a steep learning curve, but I’m grateful that the technology existed for me to be able to carry on earning when I wasn’t able to teach my students in person. For me though, it wasn’t going to be a way forward, I didn't, don't and can’t see that I ever will enjoy teaching through a screen as much as I do in person. It is a useful tool to have for the odd occasion, students who get stuck at home for some reason or live far away enough that travelling to face-to-face lessons would be impractical, but it also has to be the right student. Teaching beginners and children - unless they happen to be particularly fastidious in their practice - are, to me at least, a nightmare to teach online. You seem to need a student who already has the basics under their belt - how to hold a pick, what a fret is etc. - and they need to be motivated enough to ask questions about what they are doing. You need a student who is going to ask if they are doing it right, as it is all too easy to miss a wandering finger or a confused picking pattern over an often dodgy internet connection. 

Which brings me to another problem with online lessons. The percentage of time spent teaching online that both myself and the student have perfect sound and visual is minimal to say the least. Pixelated vision and your student sounding like they are underwater are not the easiest things to contend with when trying to explain the correct fingering of a chord or scale. Then the app updates and you lose sound all together or spend half the lesson talking to your students forehead because their camera has shifted.

All of these are reasons why I don’t personally go for online teaching as a rule. It works for the occasional student and it's a useful tool when needed but I’m glad it only accounts for a minimal amount of my working week. It may be that I’m just not very good at it. I’m quietly confident about my abilities as a face-to-face teacher and workshop leader. I've been doing it a long time and know the schemes and tricks that can be used to get students from where they are to where you want them to be in those settings. There are likely a host of different routes that I could take to improve my online teaching but I don’t see how anything is going to get me to the point of enjoying face-to-screen teaching as much as in person human interaction.

Anyway, that is my little rant about online teaching, which is not what this post is supposed to be about. Having read this far you may be of the opinion that I’m just some ageing Luddite technophobe who is writing these blog posts using a quill, sitting at an ornate oak desk with leather trim in my smoking jacket. It’s a nice thought, but I’m actually writing this on my smartphone whilst walking back from dropping my car off at the garage because life and time don’t allow for such niceties as blotting paper and ink wells. The point is, I don’t dislike technology, and it definitely has a useful place in guitar teaching and more widely music education.

After the pandemic I fully expected to have to incorporate online teaching into my daily life, presuming that students would not see the advantage to travelling the distance to a face-to-face guitar lesson when they could stay at home and more easily fit their hobbies into a busy life. But interestingly, the time after the pandemic up until now has been the busiest my teaching calendar has been for a long time. Most students were more than eager to get back to face-to-face lessons, having spent the previous two years predominantly living online, but it wasn’t just my pre-Covid students returning that filled up my week. There was an increase in new students and a common theme among them as to why they had turned up to face-to-face lessons post pandemic. 

The stories were almost identical across the board. They had taken up guitar during lockdown and as was the way with most things during that time, the only option was to do it online. So either using an app, a website or trawling through the millions of lesson videos on YouTube, they set about learning guitar. They got some basics down, a few songs half learnt and felt like they were getting somewhere. But then they plateaued, there was no more improvement, they got stuck in a rut, and so they signed up for some face-to-face lessons to spur them on to the next level. In the process of teaching them over the weeks and months that followed I noticed a few common traits in what they had already learnt. Not so much bad habits - although there were a few of those - but more gaps in their knowledge. So here are 5 things that online guitar lessons don’t teach you, or at least some don’t, but you definitely should know.

1 - You need to tune a guitar

This may seem obvious to some and to be fair, it is to anybody with a basic knowledge of how guitar works. But what is less obvious - and this is not unique to the group of students we were just talking about - is how often you have to tune a guitar. I have had students turn up to lessons surprised that their guitar is out of tune despite having had it tuned the week before. It is good practice to tune your guitar every time you pick it up to play. Even if it doesn’t sound too bad then it is worth checking it at least. 

To tune your guitar you need two things, a tuner and the knowledge of which notes each string should be tuned to. You can learn to do it by ear or to a piano note if you wish but to be honest that’s stuff you can learn later on. As a beginner, get yourself a clip-on tuner, they don’t cost much and they make life super easy. The notes of the strings are E A D G B E in standard tuning. That is from thickest string to thinnest in order. You can remember this with the handy mnemonic Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie. 

2 - It’s a physical thing

Playing guitar involves using muscles that you may not have used in a while. There are not many tasks in life where you are required to use all of your fingers separately for different purposes, I think typing and playing an instrument are about it. So you have to give your hands time to get used to a new way of working. There will be buzzy sounds and muted notes for a while and that it is fine, accept them. Your hands will not bend enough to hold chord shapes properly and fingers will take time to get strong enough to hold down some notes well. This is normal, it takes time and patience and that shouldn’t put you off. You will be perfectly able to play a D chord for example, but you may find that at first, two of the four strings you are hitting don’t sound proper and are muffled. That is fine, do not worry, keep playing, your hands will eventually get used to these new ways of doing things and your D chord will sound clear. 

There are exercises that you can do to help your hands along the way. Finger Gyms is what I call them, where you practice using all four fingers of your fretting hand in various patterns across the fretboard. These gyms help your hands get used to stretching out and working independently. Scales are also very good practice for this.

3 - Guitar strings need to be changed

Another thing that often passes the beginner guitar player by is the knowledge that guitar strings should be changed fairly regularly. Ideally, if you're playing a little every day, then about every three months would be ideal. But that’s not a rule set in stone by any means and certainly not one I myself adhere to even though I should. Six months is ok and a year is certainly the limit for regularly played steel strings. It is not uncommon for a new student to turn up with a guitar borrowed from a friend or uncle where the strings could quite easily be the ones the factory put on decades before. Other students bought a guitar five to ten years ago, have been learning online, teaching themselves bits when life allows or have simply left the guitar in the corner somewhere waiting for life to ease enough for them to learn how to use it, but it has never occurred to them to change the strings. This results in dull sounding, painful, hard to play strings that are not useful to an aspiring guitarist.

A good rule of thumb is that if the colour of the strings at the machine heads (where the strings attach at the top of the guitar) are a significantly different colour to the strings where your fingers are then it is probably time to change your strings. You can change them yourself, there are plenty of online tutorials to follow or take them to a guitar shop and get them to do it for you.

Top tip: find yourself a luthier or dedicated guitar repair person. They can not only change your strings but also set up your guitar to get it to its most playable state. This attaches to a further topic on why buying cheap guitars doesn’t help you learn.

4 - When is a guitar not a guitar?

There is widespread confusion in the non-guitar playing populace about what a guitar actually is. There are some obvious characteristics we can break down for what we would see as a standard guitar, which is a musical instrument that has six strings attached to the front of it under which - at least for a portion of it - lays a wooden neck that has metal frets attached. That is about it as a basic description of a guitar, and even then the six strings bit can be confusing when twelve-string and tenor (four-string) guitars are thrown into the mix. Here is a really quick breakdown of the different types of guitar there are:

Classical or Spanish guitar

These are the guitars that up until the 1990s nearly everybody started learning on. They have nylon strings, which in practice means that three of the strings feel plastic and the other three are tightly wound metal with a nylon core (metal but still kind of soft). They are wooden, hollow and for some reason commonly a kind of orange colour, although nowadays you can buy them in pink, blue or pretty much any colour you choose. They are predominantly designed for playing classical music but because nylon strings are a little easier on the fingers they tend to be given to beginners to start out on.

Acoustic Guitar

This is what most people want to play. They are again wooden and hollow, but they have steel strings on them. This is the sound that most people who are wanting to learn guitar with aspirations to play a few songs around the campfire are looking for. It’s Bob Dylan, it’s Nirvana Unplugged, it’s Ed Sheeran. 

Electric Guitar

Generally solid, not hollow although some are a little hollow. Designed to be plugged into an amplifier and steel strings. There are literally thousands of accessories you buy to go with an electric guitar to make you sound something like Hendrix or Clapton, Hetfield or Dimebag, Satriani or Vai, whatever you are into. Generally easier on the fingers than an acoustic guitar.

There is no strict rule here but what I will say from my observations of students’ experiences is that those who start on a classical guitar but then want to move to an acoustic guitar find the transition quite hard, the strings are tougher, the neck is a different shape. Whilst those who start on an acoustic guitar but really ultimately want to play electric wonder why they were making life hard for themselves when they swap over. The thing to do is to think about what kind of music you want to play and buy the guitar that suits that style. Let it never be said again that the ‘proper’ way to learn guitar is to start on a nylon string classical guitar. That is an outdated idea and should be stricken from our vernacular.

Side note to parents: please let your child learn on an electric guitar if they want to, they will have more fun with it, they will practice more, plus you can plug them into headphones if necessary. 

5 - How to play nicely with others.

This has been most noticeable in students who have already travelled quite far down the journey of learning online, they have successfully conquered the basic chords, several riffs, possibly even a scale (although that is rare) but they have never played along with anyone else. This is an important step, playing along with backing tracks can help, but the human brain isn’t as motivated when it is tussling with a computer as it is with an actual human. The backing track isn’t going to tell you that you are out of time, neither will it adjust to compensate so you get used to what in-time sounds like. I have had several students over the last few years start with me whose only real fault in their playing has been the lack of timing, which is fine, as it gives us something to work on. However, if you are stuck with learning online, then I would suggest that you find some way of playing with other people, friends or a community band, or jam session/sing-around. There are plenty of opportunities out there, but you do have to look for them. You will learn more about being a musician by playing with others than you could ever possibly hope to learn from lessons, online or otherwise.   

Each of these topics I will go into in more depth for future blog posts but to sum up, I am not against online learning, but there are some pitfalls that most people are not aware of and that is what I have addressed here. Face-to-face lessons can be expensive and the online alternatives much cheaper, but what I would encourage you to do is find a local guitar teacher who is willing to give you a lesson once a month or every other month, to go through what you have been learning online and just check everything is in order. It will likely save you a lot of hassle and re-learning you might find yourself doing further down the road.

The internet is huge, and there are many great guitar teachers out there producing good lessons, but there is also a lot of rubbish. Some warning signs to be aware of are: if the person spends any amount of time showing off about how good they are at playing guitar, that is a red flag to start with, they don’t understand the role of a teacher. Also look out for ridiculous promises, like these ten things will instantly improve your playing or this one scale shape is the one that the pros won’t tell you about. I won't swear here but let's just say that those kinds of lessons are suited to being on the grass in fields inhabited by male cows.  

I fully acknowledge here that what they are doing with those kinds of promises is creating clickbait, which is exactly what I have done here with a title like "5 things online guitar lessons won’t tell you". I’m sure there are lessons online out there that do tell you this stuff, I just haven’t seen them or come across them through my students. But that is the world we live in, so if you did take the bait, then thank you for reading this far, I hope that something in here has been of use.

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