Setting up for success

A few deft keystrokes in Google will return a bounty of online guitar courses. Roughly 75 million in fact.

The trouble is, with so much choice, where do you start? Do you dive into one of the top five and keep your fingers crossed? Do you search for countless reviews, realise they all say much the same, and then dive into one of the top five? Should you just YouTube your favourite songs with the suffix ‘guitar lesson’ and see what pops up?

Well, the answer to those questions will come in subsequent articles, but before you even contemplate tickling and prodding your favourite internet search engine let’s take a quick peek at setting up to succeed.

One thing you will notice, and understandably, online lessons make assumptions about how well set you are to actually practice then dive right into playing. Some, I know, make brief recommendations about the guitar type, how to sit straight and other practical matters.

It pays off to be organised - if it’s easy to pick up your guitar and practice according to a preset plan, you are much more likely to make the sort of progress which motivates you to go further. But beyond the instrument there are other things which help that get precious little airtime. So I decided that in this article I would take a dose of my own medicine, go back to the start and share learnings along the way.

I will start with the practice set-up, the minimal equipment used, and the thought process around practice time and choice of online lessons. Over a six month period starting late 2020 I will post regular blogs charting progress and making comparisons between the different online lesson providers I will use throughout the journey.

Several months ago, I tried the Fender Play learning app, but not in a wholly committed way. There were things I liked and some niggles around the devices I was using. Overall I found it easy to get along with so I will use this to begin my learning odyssey.

Information on Fender Play and how to subscribe for a free trial can be found here:

Fender Play

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