Once upon a time, long, long ago men and women learnt to play guitar from books or, if they were lucky, a guitar teacher. Books could supply them with the information they needed like what the note symbols meant and what a major key is, and a teacher could guide their wide-eyed students, explaining things they did not understand, and showing them the right way to hold the guitar and how to change chords. If a fledgling guitarist could not find a teacher, and books were not available, then they learnt what music they could from the radio or records, piecing together how to make the music come out of the instrument.



Guitar lesson videos may not be as inspiring, uplifting and bloodthirsty as your average chick flick but to their devoted fans they represent entry to the real world of action - the realm of realizing dreams and acquiring new skills.

Guitar playing used to be a hard-won achievement bought with sweat filled hours cringing under the gaze of a grey-pony tailed train wreck who once had a beer with Eric Clapton. Guitar lessons on video filter out the nasty aspects of personal interaction and leave us with the elements we need to absorb the music, the picking patterns and the fingerings.

Video guitar lessons present the best aspects of traditional one-on-one or group guitar lessons combined with the permanent record of musical theory and history of your genre that you usually learn from books or by talking with your teacher. Now, through the magic of video, our guitar lessons can be presented to us again and again, showing us how to place our fingers, the fine points of acoustic clawhammer picking, and what pentatonic scales sound like, all in high definition video.

Not only do we see the hands of a real guitar player showing us the chord changes but the hands are twice their real size and can be slowed down if we are having a hard time understanding the lesson. There are video lessons of impressive quality for any style of guitar playing.

If you are a beginner you can find the basic first steps in guitar playing explained by an experienced teacher. If you are an experienced guitarist who wants to expand your knowledge, you can find advanced or specialized courses in lead guitar or jazz or flamenco to you help you explore new musical territory. If your guitar course is on video you can keep it and watch it many times.

One advantage of video guitar lessons is that your video teacher doesn't expect anything from you. You can be as stupid and bumbling as a bag of chalk and the teacher on video will not bat an eyelid. He will patiently go through the whole lesson again without so much as a sigh or a roll of the eyes. And you only have to pay him once.

So video guitar lessons have many of the advantages of expensive lessons with live teachers without unnecessary expense and inconvenience of travelling to and from a teacher with whom you might not have a good working relationship.