If you’re thinking about learning guitar or have already started, but are having doubts, it might help you to know a bit more about how I got started.
I never meant to be a guitarist. In fact, I once thought I’d never understand the first thing about playing a musical instrument, reading music, or heaven forbid, writing my own.
I confessed as much to a Canadian tour group my father and I met while hiking in the Grand Canyon back in sixth grade. Sure, I had a music class back then, but I couldn’t understand anything the teacher was saying about quarter notes and eighth notes and staves and so on.
But a year later, something changed. A new kid joined my class, and while rejected by the rest of the students, he quickly became my best friend. So we visited each other often, and I heard him practice piano—mostly classical, such as Mozart and Beethoven. I thought it sounded beautiful, and for the first time, I wondered if I could learn how to do that, too.
After mulling it over for about six months, I asked my mom if I could take piano lessons. Her response: “We don’t have a piano. And they’re expensive! I’ll ask your dad, but I don’t think so.” My heart sank a bit, but money was always tight, so I wasn’t really surprised.
The next summer, we hosted an Italian exchange student who also became a good friend. After he returned to Rome, my mother arranged for me to take Italian lessons with a friend of hers. As it happened, the location of her class was not far from where my brothers had started taking guitar lessons a few months earlier. So after class, my father picked me up and took me with them to their lessons, and I sat and watched while Bruce Casteel of Columbia Music Studios taught.
After some weeks of this arrangement, my father suggested perhaps I should start learning guitar, since we already had those, and when we got a piano, I could switch. I had heard from him and my siblings that guitar was harder, so I refused, whereupon his suggestion became a command, and suddenly I found myself in the student’s chair.
Bruce did a good job of showing my clueless self how to play notes from the Scale-Chord Synopticon on the guitar right away, but I had no idea how to read music, and remained lost and unable to do the assignments he gave me for several weeks. Once he understood the problem, he assigned my brother with the task of teaching me how to read guitar music.
A few months later, guitar and music itself were no longer a total mystery, and in fact I was having a lot of fun, even bringing my guitar to school occasionally to jam with other classmates who played.
So by the time my father bought my family a piano the next Christmas, I no longer felt the need to switch, and instead, I simply started tinkering with piano on the side.
The bottom line is it doesn’t really matter what you know or can do now. I knew nothing when I started, and over time, I learned. You can learn, too. But as with any skill in life, you have to do the work necessary to develop it.
And I mean do the work physically, not mentally. Watching, reading, and listening to the best guitar teachers in the world will get you nowhere if you don’t also physically pick up your guitar and fret and pluck the strings with your own hands, as many times as it takes to build the strength, flexibility, and coordination to do so and ingrain it into your muscle memory.
I will do my best to give you as much guidance as I can via video lessons and written or audio supplements. But if you later find—or have already found—that online lessons are not enough to help you understand what you need to do, or that you need help disciplining yourself to practice, the best choice may be face-to-face lessons with a competent instructor.
Of course, one-on-one, live video chat lessons may be another option with modern internet speeds; however, I personally believe that if you’re going to pay a lot of money for lessons, doing them in person produces the best results.
The only way to know what’s best for you is to try. If you find that guitar isn’t what you want to do with your time after all, fine. At least you tried. And there’s no better teacher than experience.