Problems With YouTube Guitar Instruction

Nowadays, it seems that any person with a webcam and a few free hours feel that they are a qualified teacher.

While this may be true in some cases (some only need that webcam and some free time to put together some great informative lessons), in most cases it is far from reality.

Owning a guitar and a webcam and knowing how to play the guitar is completely different from owning a guitar and a webcam and knowing how to teach the guitar.

This is a recurring issue today, with every thirteen year old and forty-seven year old alike thinking that they have a gift to share with everyone in the world and we’re just honored to benefit from their vast wisdom.

In this article, we’ll talk about some of the problems often found with YouTube guitar instructional videos, as the ones above are only the tip of the iceberg.

First off, when you record with a webcam, what kind of sound quality do you expect? If you said good, then you’re a bit off the mark. Webcams have notoriously bad sound quality, as well as video lag, added to reduced frame rate to make a train wreck of a video.

And the simple fact is, many YouTube guitar instructional videos are recorded with such poor equipment that you can’t understand half of the things going on in the video.

This is a shame as it means that, unless you have a budget (anything over thirty dollars), you won’t have a good video. But that doesn’t stop most posters, and therein lays the problem. Most people care more about how many views they can get than what they can offer. Bad reviews and good reviews don’t matter; everyone wants a moment in the limelight, and YouTube offers that to anyone and everyone at all.

Another problem with YouTube guitar instructional videos is due to YouTube itself. YouTube’s sorting method is very poor for musicians looking for serious lessons. Why? There are millions of kids on the internet who love sweeping and guitar soloing, and they’ll rate videos of people doing those and tagging them as “lessons” above actual lessons, thus you wind up having to wade through pages of videos to find those gems that will actually do your playing some good.

You have to consider that for every one serious minded musician, there are fifty to a hundred guitarists whose only goal in life is to impress people with fancy tricks, and these are the types of videos that will be crammed down your throat on YouTube.

Unless you are able to identify a specific need for a search (and even then you’ll be swamped out by “world’s fastest solo” and “sick insane sweep solo”) you won’t have as much luck pouring through the thousands of online guitar instruction videos on YouTube as you will looking on good old Google or Yahoo search.

In the end, it all depends on your interest. If your find with sweeping videos, YouTube will be your home; if not, you’ll have some trouble.

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