Learning The Guitar … ONLINE!

I remember when I first started learning to play the guitar, there was a lot of hassle involved. I’d finish up from school, get home and just as mum was preparing dinner, she’d have to stop and rush me off to my guitar lesson.

It wasn’t so much of an issue to me…I loved it! But it would stress mum out to no end. Every week at the same time she’d drop everything and rush me out the door. Homework, dinner, everything would end up late for the whole family.

This continued all the way through my primary school days until high school.

Then there was the break through! My high school offered music tuition during school hours. We’d be pulled out of class once a week for our lessons. Great for me when my lesson time was during Maths or English. Not so great for my parents or my overall exam results. But with 3 brothers who were also all learning instruments and both mum and dad working full time, there wasn’t really any other option.

So once a week I would have my school bag filled with all my books as well as my guitar (in the hard case). I’d walk a kilometre to the bus stop before school and then back home again, rain hail or shine.

Once I started uni, it was a totally different level of study. Classes upon classes of intense music theory and application. I’d have 10 teachers insisting that it would take 2 hours practise every day for each of their classes to get through the exams. I was practising daily for hours on end while working to pay my tuition fees and not getting much sleep at all! I loved every minute of it!

During my high school days I started teaching regularly. I offloaded all the information I knew onto new eager minds. I found that teaching really made me focus in on the process of learning music. I took more and more students and before I knew it I had a music school with several teachers working for me. During this time, I spent years developing a syllabus for all students that would be logical and make sense to a first time player.

All my experiences in learning and teaching made me think “there has to be a better way”.

As computer and internet speeds have become increasingly faster, it made me realise that there is a way!

What if I could bring my teaching technique and my syllabus into the online world. What if i could give a student the same level of tuition through a video as i could in person. It’s not really a new idea. Artists have been doing masterclass videos for years, but how would you approach teaching an absolute beginner. A student that knows absolutely nothing about music or the instrument.

The answer was simple…It would take a massive amount of work on my part. However I knew that with diligence and attention to detail, it would be possible. I wanted to create a solution to the challenges I faced as a student and as a teacher.

So what were these challenges?

• TIME: Learning an instrument is a change of lifestyle. Traveling to and from a teacher. This forces a commitment by parents and friends to get you to your allocated time slot. Not to mention the commitment to the practise time. If you had a busy week and didn’t get enough practise in, your next lesson will be a repeat of the week before.

• RETAINING EXPLANATIONS: As a teacher and a student, one big challenge was to ensure that the student remembers how the teacher explains each technique. While I never experienced a lesson both as a teacher and student where notes weren’t given, hand written and in some cases printed notes don’t explain everything. As a teacher, you become reliant on the student remembering exactly what you’ve told them. Which in most cases doesn’t really happen. As a student I also wanted to always practise to backing tracks that were specific to my lessons. Back in the day I had to make these myself and spent more time making these then I did practising.

• CREDIBILITY: As a student you want to know that your teacher knows what their talking about. You not only want to see that your getting the correct detailed information, but you want it to come from a credible source.

• DETAIL: As a student, diagrams and progressive drawings really help you to understand exactly how to do something. You’d probably notice that teachers tend to make notes or show images to support what they are saying, and add to it as they go along. This technique is extremely interactive. The teacher can go more in-depth or go on a tangent based on the questions the students ask. Our challenge was to bring this into a multimedia format.

• PRICE: When I started playing it was $10 a lesson. Today it is anywhere between $25 and $50 for half an hour. It’s not unreasonable, but with todays cost of living, disposable income to spend on a weekly lesson can be a challenge.

So how did we provide the solutions to these challenges with the LICK FACTORY?

To start with, there is no travelling. Having the lessons allocated to a students account ONLINE means that the student can complete the lesson at any time of day or night in any location. We made the LICK FACTORY an easy way to learn that can be adapted to your lifestyle.

We tackled the students retaining information with two methods. Firstly, the lessons can be watched repeatedly. Once you’ve unlocked a lesson it will remain available to you in your account forever. There will be no more questioning of what was said, you can simply re-watch the segment or episode.

The second way is by providing lesson notes in a PDF format. The lesson notes gives you the important theoretical and technique points for each lesson. It also has all the exercises, chord shapes, scale diagrams etc that you will need for the weeks practise.

And for the backing tracks? We went into the studio and recorded tracks for each and every exercise. The way we look at it, is that a student now has the option of practising online or off. Load up your i-pod with the backing tracks, Print out the PDF’s or put them on your i-pad or laptop and you can practise anywhere, at any time on your own terms.

Tackling the credibility was an easy one for us. We know that there are teachers and there are players. Being able to do one, doesn’t necessarily mean you can do the other. We ensure that all our staff, current and future are both teachers and professional players. You need to know that your teacher “practises what they preach”. The teacher needs to be able to explain the finest detail both from a theoretical and practical approach. This doesn’t only apply to their individual technique, but all techniques.

Of all our challenges, getting the ‘Detail’ process was the most difficult. Our lessons are running to our proven syllabus, but how do we anticipate questions, and how do we show our thought process with images. We answered this by creating in depth animations that accompany every lesson. The animations show exactly what we’re talking about in detail so the student not only gets the auditory point, but the visual as well. We test every episode with our control group to ensure that every point is acknowledged and understood by each student.

We know we didn’t think of every question, so we’ve set each lesson page up with a comments box. This way students can ask a question directly to the teacher or get the answers from other students in a forum style manner. Every comment is moderated and the student receives a personal reply answering the question by one of our staff before the post is added.

Of all our challenges, the easiest one to overcome was the price. We know that the price of learning an instrument is always an issue. Rates for teachers are by no means unreasonable, however what effect does learning an instrument have on an individuals or a families weekly budget? We responded to that challenge by offering the cheapest instrument tuition of its kind. At just $8.54 a lesson, the price point is a steal…Even against tuition prices 20 years ago!

With all the pain staking hard work. Testing and re-testing, I am happy to say that I believe that we have accomplished exactly what we set out to active. We have built the most detailed, most comprehensive guitar tuition course ever created ONLINE! There is no better way to learn the guitar. Get started on your rock star journey today!

Learn in your own time, at your own pace and on your own terms.