Countless people spend countless hours practicing guitar playing without seeing any concrete results. This frustrating but unexpected. The reason why there are so many frustrated guitarists (or musicians for that matter) is because they are flying blind. In other words, they do not know what they are doing. According to Tom Hess Guitar, former guitarist of HolyHell and Rhapsody of Fire, there are three big mistakes that amateurs do when they are trying to improve their musical skill.
Do Not Just Hire Any Typical Guitar Teacher
Tom Hess insists that most guitar teachers who teach online or by Skype are actually not professional teachers. They are not certified or qualified to teach anyone. One easy way to check the credibility of an online music teacher is to look for positive reviews and testimonials from the previous students of this teacher. If this teacher is unable to provide any positive endorsements from any students, then this should be a red flag. Unqualified and/or low quality music teachers are not just lying to themselves, but they are also actually harming their students because they are not really helping their students improve their guitar playing. At the very least, these unqualified teachers simply waste students’ time and money. However, what usually happens is that students who actually have potential but simply need the right guidance are pushed to the wrong direction by a bad music teacher.
Do Not Try To Teach Yourself
There are countless aspiring guitarists who already have some kind of playing skill and think they can just improve by themselves. So they spend time online, watching free instructional videos on YouTube and end up feeling frustrated when they realize they are either not getting better or are actually getting worse. Tom Hess has seen this happen far too often and he insists that trying to teach yourself is a waste of time. “You know how much frustration, struggle and even damage typical and unqualified guitar teachers can cause you. These guys teach local or internet guitar lessons for a living. You probably don’t, so that means the unintended damage, bad habits and problems you may cause yourself may very likely actually be worse.”
Do Not rely On Free Or Cheap Online Lessons
It might be tempting to skimp on online lessons, but Tom Hess insists that this is the wrong way to go. First, these free online lessons are probably uploaded by the very same unqualified, low quality teachers who are just pretending to be professionals. Worse, some of the online videos were simply uploaded by random YouTube users who have no music knowledge or experience. Since there are countless free videos online, there is no way of knowing which clips are worth watching. So much time will be lost by clicking random clips, hoping that by chance you might stumble upon a good one.
