Hi All,
I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to reply to this thread. I did not see it and Chuck brought it to my attention yesterday... but I hesitated on answering because I was really thinking about the best way to answer to it.
It is definitely true that the forum has expanded to the point where I simply don't get to read everything. In fact, I admit I probably don't get to read a lot of things. In particular I miss the days when I could listen to every single recording and comment.
Fortunately, there are a lot of great people here and great players as well. People with years of experience that can often answer a question using nearly the exact same words that I would use
The "not playing the lesson at the beginning first" tactic is something that I've fought for years and here is why I often do not do it:
If you are a private student... when I play something and you hear it, you'll instantly get an idea in your head of how it is supposed to go.
Your ear will assign certain notes to certain beats - and they will be wrong. And I will spend the next half an hour trying to fix that one little thing.
If it's in a video, it'll never get fixed because unless you are willing to count the lesson out and find the mistake in your initial interpretation and work past it... well it just stays wrong.
For more advanced students with a better trained ear this is not so much of a problem. But for the bulk of the people I teach, it's a real stumbling block.
I realize that we live in a world where the 3 step system is important:
1. Show them what you're going to teach them
2. Teach them
3. Tell them what you taught them.
That's a good way to sell stuff... it's not a good way to actually make better guitar players. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that's the truth.
The other part of this is the fact that in many cases, I'm teaching something you've probably heard before. If I'm teaching the "Born Under a Bad Sign" riff... well you've heard that probably so I'd rather not play it at the top and bring back your (likely) flawed recollection of it.
Believe me, I care very much about this. I spend 95% of my time thinking about how I can better serve this community and actually make better guitar players - not just guys who can play a few riffs, but aren't in any better position to get up and jam at the local bar.
Guys like Marty, David, etc., are not bad guys and they are teaching in their way. I definitely know that Marty, in particular, is extremely popular.
I also know that those guys are not always teaching what needs to be taught. And I know this both from seeing their materials, and from the emails I get from people who have bought those courses and then realized this down the road and come over here.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put anyone down. I know Marty, Dan, Bob, David, and many of those guys pretty well. Everyone's got their thing and it works for some group of people.
I've always tried to be the guy who catered to people who really want to learn to be better guitarists and musicians. The youtube stuff is all about something quick that you can learn in 10 minutes.
While that is a diversion for 10 minutes, it's not really the right way to tackle the problem... assuming the problem is really becoming a better guitar player.
And while it's not a big deal to do that once in a while, if it's something you're doing every day, you might want to ask yourself why, and what you're really looking for?
I have started trying to show the riff or lesson first in some of my more recent youtube videos. I may not have done that in the Insiders stuff because much of that was filmed some time ago.
On the DVDs, if you want to see the lesson first, just navigate to the play along first, and then you'll see what you'll be learning. That's easy.
Honestly what concerns me the most about all of this is that I didn't realize how much people here on this forum were spending time on youtube grabbing quick little lessons...
If you only have 10 minutes to do something:
* play a lick in one of the solos in your DVD course that's giving you trouble. If you don't have it memorized... well then there's part of the problem
* spend the 10 minutes listening to the tune on CD or on your ipod or whatever. Listening is a HUGE part of learning to play. In the "old days" before the internet we would listen to an example for days or weeks as we tried to learn it. That time is very well spent.
* work on some of the theory exercises if you have them
* throw on a jam track and just noodle over it - this is probably the best way to kill 10 minutes I know of.
* watch the next lesson on the DVD while your fingers run scale patterns. You don't need to focus on your fingers (hopefully) so you can easily see what's to come on the DVD while you do that.
* Try to figure out a song or riff by ear. That's 100 times more useful to you than learning it from somebody on youtube - and I can tell you that for any song I look up, 9 out of 10 people are playing it and teaching it wrong. Same goes for ultimate-guitar.com tabs.
I'm running out of available characters for my post, but I hope you all take the time to read it and think about it.
The real problem is not whether or not the little freebie lessons on youtube are any good... it's why you're looking there in the first place and what to do about that.
Griff
PS - I welcome responses and opinions here. Discussion is good