The question of whether a new guitarist should learn from guitar lessons DVDs or hire a teacher is a common one. You can find plenty of people that will argue both are better than the other, which can make this a tough question to answer. Considering there are self-taught and trained professional guitarists, it does show that both can work quite well.
A guitar teacher is not actually a guarantee of good training. As great as having a good teacher can be with eliminating issues early on, a bad teacher can actually so thoroughly damage your ability to learn the instrument that you will never be a decent guitarist learning from them. A bad teacher can frustrate someone who could have been a good, motivated student so badly that they completely quit learning to play.
Of course, the obvious thing is just to go to a good teacher, but here is the problem with that. Most guitar teachers are awful, there is no correlation between how much they charge and how good a teacher is, and every teacher’s students think they are amazing teachers. Finding a good teacher tends to be blind luck more than searching. Joe Satriani taught Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett, Marty Friedman, and many other famous guitarists before he got famous. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
This means that even if money is not the problem, just trying to locate a good teacher could very well be it. The question is where do the good teachers go to teach? Oddly enough, quite a number of them go on to teach through guitar instruction DVDs. The reason that guys like Troy Stetina make so many guitar lessons dvd is because they are good teachers. The companies that make these DVDs do put time, effort, and even their reputation on the line when they make one, so they do spend the money to try to get the best teachers they can.
That is actually a very nice thing about guitar instructional DVDs, you get to learn from some of the best guitar teachers around for a fraction of the cost of what being one of there students would be. Of course, you do miss out on feedback and some of the give and take relationship of student and teacher, but you also don’t inadvertently end up with a bad teacher hurting your playing either.
Why spend the extra money learning from someone in the back of the music store when you can learn from some of the best teachers from around the world? Anyone can call themselves a guitar teacher, and unfortunately that is the case with a lot of them. Even if a person is a good, well-trained guitarist, they aren’t necessarily going to be a good teacher.
You are learning the same techniques from a guitar instructional dvd as a teacher would show you, so if you do put the effort to learning them properly, you will learn to use them just as well. Needless to say, the convenience of a DVD over a live person can be extremely helpful for a lot of people as well.
Does that mean that guitar teachers are completely replaced and everyone should learn from guitar lessons DVDs? Not really. If you can find a good teacher and have the money for it, then it can be a wonderful experience. However, those can both be rather big ifs. Just visit our website and you will be able to see all the lessons you can learn on your own. You don’t need an instructor to learn guitar, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to spend the money for one if you can’t afford it.
