Why guitar lessons with a tutor will improve your playing faster than free online tutorials!

Learning guitar online via YouTube or other sources is an incredibly popular way to start your guitar journey these days, some YouTube channels clocking in millions of views on each of their videos. Although this method of learning can be a great way to get started on the guitar, many players will hit a roadblock with this method for a few reasons, which may steer them into partaking in lessons with a personal guitar tutor.

Real Time Feedback!

The major drawback to learning the guitar online is that due to the video being pre-recorded, the teacher on the screen won’t be able to give you any feedback on your playing! You could be playing a blues lick for hours off of an instructional video that you are watching and not be able to figure out why it doesn’t sound like the video, but if there were a live tutor there they could tell you that it’s actually your timing that is not synced up! This would make the learning process one hundred times quicker for the student while also building solid fundamentals and technique that is critiqued in real time as the student is playing.

Not only can a live tutor (whether it be in person or online via video call) give feedback on your playing, but could also give you advice on if your guitar is setup correctly or if it is appropriate for what you are playing. The reason why you aren’t able to play your barre chords properly yet could actually have nothing to do with your technique, but could be the fact that the string height on the guitar is far too high to play!

Lessons in Digestible Chunks

Online tutorials will be made with a certain experience level of player in mind, meaning the pace on this video may be too easy or too advanced for where you are at at present! Have you ever clicked on a video and thought the instructor was moving far too slowly and you just wanted to get to the important bit, or perhaps you had no idea what the tutor was talking about because the video was for a far more advanced level of player? This can be dangerous since this can ruin your motivation that you had built up for your practice session, when in reality all you were missing was the lesson explained at a more digestible level. A quality experienced tutor will be able to talk you through the material at a pace that makes sense to you whilst still making the lesson fun and entertaining!

Question Time?

Possibly the most valuable part of having lessons with a live tutor is that you get to ask them questions in real time on anything that you don’t understand. This is incredibly valuable because if you don’t understand one connecting part of a concept, the rest of a YouTube tutorial may not make any sense since you aren’t yet able to connect the dots. Quite often the answer to your question will be simple and will only take the tutor a minute or two to explain and demonstrate the answer to your question, which will also be specific to your query instead of general advice seen on YouTube tutorials. If it is a question specific to your own playing such as “am I holding the pick correctly” there is no way for a YouTube tutorial to know how you are holding the pick in the first place, so finding the answer to this question would take much longer and not be anywhere near as simple of a process.