The debate many new guitarists end up having with themselves is whether or not they need to spend a lot of money on a teacher or if learning from guitar lessons DVDs works just as well. Of course, there are arguments for both methods and you can find plenty of self-taught and instructor trained guitarists in the professional circles.
A guitar teacher can be a double-edged sword, a good guitar teacher can let you progress faster than a student could have expected, and eliminate bad habits early on, before the student has enough experience to start getting rid of those habits themselves. However, a bad guitar teacher will slow your progress down, frustrate you, and potentially damage your playing so badly that it will take longer to eliminate the habits that teacher taught you, than it should have taken to learn in the first place.
Of course, it would be easy to just decide to go to a good teacher, but that isn’t quite the cure all it would seem to be. Most guitar teachers are simply bad, but most guitar students have experience with only one guitar teacher, so naturally they assume the teacher taking their hard earned money must be a good one. When it comes down to it, it ends up being more blind luck than anything else. The odds that Steve Vai would have got training by Joe Satriani when he did would have been non-existent had they not gone to the same school.
Even if money is not an issue, finding a good instructor just simply might not be possible for a guitarist. So then where to find them? Not surprisingly many excellent guitar teachers happen to be the same people that get asked to make the guitar instruction DVDs out on the market. It does make sense, a company decides to spend the time and money to produce a guitar lessons DVD. Naturally, they want the best instructor they can get. This is the reason why you see people like Troy Stetina writing so many books and making so many DVDs, they keep getting hired by these companies because they are legitimately good teachers.
One of the nice things about guitar instructional DVDs is that they do let you learn from people you normally would not have access to for any reasonable amount of money. While you don’t get the direct feedback a teacher can provide, you also aren’t going to get the negative influences a bad teacher can provide.
When it comes down to it, spending more money to study with a guy working in the back of a music store who may very well have no real credentials or paying less money for lessons from some great teachers should be an obvious choice. Even if you know someone who is a great guitarist, they may very well not be a very good teacher. There are guitarists who get good so subconsciously they don’t even understand what they are actually doing.
The basic lesson plan of a learn to play guitar dvd is very much the same as what a teacher would show you. It is the same techniques, no matter who actually shows you. DVDs just have the added convenience that you have access to them whenever you want, you can learn at your own pace, and you can have them endlessly repeat the same information without potentially annoying anyone.
Does that mean guitar lessons dvd have completely supplanted good teachers? No, if you are lucky enough to study under a good teacher and have the extra money for it, then by all means go for it. You can still use DVDs, such as the ones you can find on our website, to supplement the techniques you learn from your teacher. However, don’t expect random guy teaching in the back of a music store to be worth the money you give him. He may end up doing far more harm than good, whether he is a Berkeley graduate virtuoso or a random guitarist off the street.
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