Showing posts with label Tutorials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tutorials. Show all posts

Sunday, July 17, 2011

How NOT To Use Guitar Video Tutorials Online

If you're thinking about taking up playing guitar then you may have already had a look online at some of the many guitar video tutorials which people have uploaded. These can give you a fairly good idea of how easy or hard learning to play guitar can be, and of the sort of tutorials that are available for you to use. Statistically most people tend to take up guitar as their first instrument, and this means little knowledge about playing an instrument, learning an instrument, reading music or performing.

Watching guitar video tutorials on video repository sites such as YouTube can provide a little inspiration helping you decide many things, from whether a guitar is right for you, to what type of guitar you're looking to buy and learn. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it this way, and watching a variety of performances and watching people explain their own tips, tricks and techniques can be very helpful in enabling you to make those early decisions, but there's one decision you should not make based solely on these videos.

Most people who take up learning to play guitar do so without any intention of paying for regular music lessons. In fact most people end up learning guitar either by using books, watching video tutorials, or learning from friends who already know how to play guitar. Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with this, although each method does carry its own inherent risks, but the one thing you should not do when using online video tutorials to help make a decision about playing guitar is to assume that those same tutorials will be the ideal way to actually learn to play guitar once you have one.

Because there are many ways to play guitar, and most of them are wrong. You'll find it almost impossible when you get started with learning guitar to identify what makes a technique good or bad. It's easy to see people's shortcuts and handy hints, incorporating them into your playing, learning and practising until they become habits. Because many of those techniques may be inadvisable, and may impair the sound quality or more likely prevent you from becoming as versatile and accomplished in future.

Removing the rear view mirror in your car may be a sound decision if you feel it important to be able to see more clearly through your windscreen, or removing the headlights so that you conserve battery, but in the long run you'll quickly find such approaches are seriously flawed when you try doing other things such as reversing or driving at night. The same is true with learning to play a guitar, because some of the techniques you'll pick up from watching online guitar video tutorials may seem sound and advisable at the time, but further down the line when you become more accomplished and you want to learn guitar tabs and take your performance to the next level, you may find your playing hindered, your techniques flawed and your ability to develop seriously hampered by bad habits.

So what's the answer? Pay a fortune for a professional music teacher to help teach you the right methods from the very start? Not necessarily, because this approach is often far too expensive for most people. Instead, the answer is not to head off to a general repository of guitar video tutorials, but instead to visit a specialist guitar video site which develops and publishes professional tutorials. You Tube offers many benefits, but the drawback is that anyone can publish, and there's no requirement for accuracy or quality. Visiting a specialist guitar video site gives you a much better chance of getting the right techniques in place before you move on to become the next guitar legend.

For a wide range of professional guitar video tutorials visit Allaxess.com where you can learn guitar tabs and techniques which will help improve your playing, whatever level you're at.


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Why You Should Be Careful About Using Guitar Tutorials Online

There's a real danger with using guitar tutorials online. Don't get me wrong, there are some fantastic guitar video tutorials available, many of which have been produced by some of the leading guitarists within the music industry. The trouble is that there are also many guitar videos which have been produced by people who would like to become one of the leading guitarists in the industry, but who at the moment are only a few steps up from playing the air guitar.

The other problem is that for those people who are hoping to move on from learning a few basic guitar chords to being able to read and play guitar tabs and guitar sheet music, learning from poorly made guitar tutorials can easily result in bad habits forming. Guitarists can very easily pick up bad habits, and whilst for some people this isn't really much of a problem, for those people who are more serious about learning to play guitar these bad habits can become real obstacles later on.

If you were wanting to learn to play the piano then you would expect that right from the very first lesson you would be taught not only how to physically play the notes, hold your hands and move your fingers, but also how to read the musical notation correctly. The two would go hand in hand, and you would be expected to apply a certain degree of discipline, practising both the technique and the theory week by week.

The same is true for learning to play almost any instrument, except, that is, for the guitar. Strangely the guitar is an instrument set aside from most other instruments. It's one of the only popular musical instruments not to feature in a classic orchestra, and it is one of the only instruments which can be picked up and learned by almost anyone very quickly indeed, without any real professional help or training.

There are very few guitarist teachers compared to piano teachers, despite the popularity of the instrument. The reason for this is that demand is very low, because most people who want to learn to play guitar are self taught, or learn with or from their friends.

Today the internet has introduced the opportunity learn to play guitar by watching guitar tutorials, and with many hundreds of thousands of guitar video tutorials getting the information you need is just a matter of a couple of mouse clicks. But just because information is easy to access and readily available doesn't necessarily mean that it is advised or recommend. Or even right.

Many tutorials are likely to encourage you to apply bad habits or poor techniques, and very few will encourage you to be more disciplined or to learn the theory of playing as well as the physical technique. If you're happy continuing to just be a casual strummer then this isn't really a problem, but if you're hoping to take your guitar playing to a new level in the future, perhaps playing solo or playing in a band, then you will need to understand more about how professional, experienced and accomplished guitarists do what they do.

Even rock guitarists will need to have a sound understanding of how to read guitar tabs, and you can learn a very great deal about how to improve your playing by learning from people like this. Of course if you don't happen to have an address book stuffed full of rock guitarists then you could head over to one of the specialist guitar video tutorials sites where professional, high quality and recommended tutorials and training is available which will help you to learn the basics in a way that won't encourage bad habits, and will more easily enable you to move on with your playing when you feel the time is right.

For high quality guitar tutorials by professional and accomplished guitarists visit Allaxess.com where you can browse a growing library of free guitar video tutorials.


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Why Beginners Should Not Rely On YouTube For Guitar Tutorials

Although it is very tempting to pop online and do a quick search for guitar tutorials, you need to be very wary of what you'll find. You may be looking for guitar instructional videos, tab charts, chord charts or other instructional material, and the great thing about the web is that it offers an almost limitless supply of instructional material. Unfortunately there's a problem, because the web isn't owned by anyone, no one runs it, no one looks after it and no one trawls the net weeding out information or advice which is incorrect or sub standard.

It might be very nice if this was the case, but as it is, anyone can post anything they like and claim it as being instructional. What you may find though is that you're being instructed to play your guitar the wrong way. Playing a guitar isn't easy, as it requires a good deal of perseverance. If you can get through the first few days without giving up then there's a good chance you'll make it. A number of people quit quite early on in the process because they find that it's just too difficult or too uncomfortable.

Certainly to begin with most people find it hard to stretch their fingers around the fret board and hold down the right strings on the right frets, making a sound that is pure and pleasant. Moving from one chord to another is also very difficult, and it can be easy for people to give up. But some people move to the net and start looking for guitar tutorials, assuming that since they're struggling with working out how to make their guitar sound less like a pigeon gargling there must be plenty of other people struggling too, and that as a result someone somewhere will have provided some help.

Whether you're looking at mending a cuckoo clock, painting golf balls or tracking down the Lesser Spotted Purple Warbler, you'll find that there will be a group of people somewhere with the same interest, providing help and support to those likeminded individuals. The online community of guitar enthusiasts is massive, and with broadband now so widely available online videos have become the biggest way in which people now search for information.

In fact if you base the statistics just on the number of searches carried out per month you'll find that YouTube is actually the second biggest search engine, beaten only by Google (who of course own YouTube anyway!) This means that if you start looking for video guitar tutorials you will find them. But if you're just starting out learning to play guitar how are you going to be able to identify which are the good ones and which aren't?

If you knew nothing at all about the Lesser Spotted Purple Warbler and you looked online and found a website informing you confidently that in order to find this delightful creature you would need to lie in wait at 3am in the middle of a snowy moor you might well find yourself shivering unnecessarily, oblivious to the fact that you ought to be up a tree in the middle of summer.

So the real problem is that the availability of guitar instructional videos is itself not enough. Beginners looking for guitar tutorials need to be given some form of help, not just in playing the guitar, but in identifying which guitar video tutorials are good, and recommended, and which are likely to be offering the wrong advice, or encouraging poor techniques. One of the best ways of overcoming this problem is not to rely on massive video sites such as YouTube, but to go to a specialist video tutorials site where all of the video guitar tutorials have been created to a high standard. YouTube might be big, but it may not necessarily be the best option for guitar tutorials.

If you're looking for high quality guitar tutorials then visit Allaxess.com where you can browse a free library of guitar instructional videos.


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