YouTube Guitar Blog

Here another great lesson on the minor pentatonic scale by my buddy Justin. The minor pentatonic scale is used in almost every popular blues and rock song. It is a great scale to learn to be able to jam with your buddies. The Am pentatonic scale is my favorite.

Hey, have you signed up for my newsletter yet? It’s FREE and you get 2 super exclusive lessons that you cannot find anywhere on the net. I would love to have you aboard so I can send you the best videos and  private lessons. 

I’ve also been in talks with the company eMusic. In trying to get more people to view this uber amazing blog, I’ve worked out a deal with them that let’s my readers download 50 FREE songs, with no commitment whatsoever. You can join and download more or you don’t have to, it’s up to you. Well, I hope you take advantage of this offer, because they said they can only do it for a limited amount of time. Here is the link for it:

And here’s the video:

Hope everyone is doing well!!! I found this great little lesson on James Taylor’s (actually Carol King’s) amazing song, “You’ve Got a Friend.” This lesson will have you playing it in no time!!

Wanna learn to play the 100 Best Songs Ever Recorded? Click here!

Let’s say you want to learn to play guitar — but you don’t have the time or money for lessons.

Why not try YouTube? A number of people teach guitar on the video-sharing Web site, offering lessons for free.

In the past few months, two teachers have posted around 200 videos that demonstrate everything from basic strumming techniques to the opening riff of “Sweet Home Alabama.” So far, people around the world have watched the videos a total of more than 3.5 million times.

One of the teachers is David Taub, who lives in San Diego and often appears wearing a flannel shirt and a backwards baseball cap. A one-time bar band rocker from New Jersey, he opens each video with the same line: “What’s up, good people!”

His most popular video, a simplified version of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” has been viewed more than 125,000 times.

The other teacher is Justin Sandercoe, who lives in London, where he teaches guitar and plays with a famous pop singer. He’s a mellow presence with an impish grin. Among his song lessons is an acoustic version of Britney Spear’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” that is surprisingly affecting.

The teachers play slowly and use close-ups, showing each finger movement. If you don’t get it at first, you can hit replay. It’s like having a teacher with endless patience.

The lessons are informal and feel home-made. Sandercoe sometimes appears sitting on his floor, with his hair matted at different angles. Taub’s lessons are mostly unedited and include moments like his golden retriever eating his guitar pick.

Taub sees the videos, at least in part, as a marketing tool for his paid instructional Web site, NextLevelGuitar.com. His videos emerged last year as an experiment when one of his students, Tim Gilberg, shot video of Taub teaching.

“We filmed about 10 minutes in his backyard,” Gilberg recalls. “I put it up on Google. Then I forgot about it. Basically, two months later I went to see how many visitors we had. There were about 6,800 visitors, and I was like: Wow!”

Then they posted the videos to YouTube, and the audience took off.

On the free videos, Taub teaches the basic chords to popular songs, but he holds off explaining some of the riffs so he can drive people to his site. After playing a riff from Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy,” he stops playing and says, “But if you want to learn that, you’re going to have to go to our full site for the lead lines, okay?”

Gilberg says the Web site has hundreds of members after only six weeks.

Justin Sandercoe also has a teaching Web site — justinguitar.com. He has a few ads and takes donations through Paypal to cover the site’s hosting fees. But Sandercoe doesn’t charge visitors; he says he sees the site as more of a public service.

“I like the idea of being able to deliver quality guitar lessons to people who can’t afford lessons, or who are in places where there’s not that kind of access to somebody who can teach them the right stuff,” he says.

When Sandercoe was growing up in Tasmania, it wasn’t easy for him to find great teachers. He hopes his videos will help kids in places like Sri Lanka or India who may not be able to learn otherwise.

Sandercoe now has fans around the world, who often e-mail him with questions and requests for specific lessons. One is Linda Dumitru, who lives in the Netherlands and used to pay $26 for a half-hour lesson. But she stopped, she says, because she couldn’t afford it. Then one day she typed “Johnny B. Goode” into YouTube and found one of Sandercoe’s videos.

Now, she plays along to his videos in her apartment after dinner. Dumitru says Sandercoe’s laid-back approach makes her want to learn. She talks about him as if he were a helpful, next-door neighbor.

“Every time he comes, he says: ‘Hi, I’m Justin.’ He says, ‘Don’t worry if you have trouble with the chords, because everybody has problems with it.’”

She adds: “It’s like he understands you. He knows what you’re going through.”

When Sandercoe isn’t teaching, he plays with Katie Melua, a star in Europe, so he’s used to some attention. But his work on the Internet is raising his profile in ways he didn’t expect.

“I got recognized on a bus the other day,” he says, sounding amazed. “I literally went into town to do a bit of shopping, and I was on the way back and this kid goes: ‘Are you Justin, the guy who teaches from YouTube?’”

But if learning pop songs for free online sounds too good to be true, it may be.

John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, says most of the songs Sandercoe and Taub teach are under copyright. He thinks it’s only a matter of time before a licensing company orders YouTube to take them down.

“There’s a very strong argument that the re-use of well-known chords in the sequence the instructor played them would be a violation of the copyright,” Palfrey says.

Sandercoe doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. After all, he says, he rarely plays the songs all the way through. But Palfrey says all it takes is a few notes.

And although Sandercoe sees his Internet teaching as a public service, he has benefited from it.

Since he put his Web site up last year, he has developed a long waiting list for the lessons he teaches in person. And both he and Taub say that’s still the best way to learn.

If someone tells Sandercoe to take down his song lessons, he says he will. But his most valuable videos are the ones that teach guitar basics — things like strumming, scales and finger-picking.

And even in the digital age, no one holds a copyright on those things.

One of the greatest songs ever written. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a song by Bob Dylan from his album Highway 61 Revisited. First issued in 1965, it represents in its length, style, and scoring, one of the most influential of Dylan’s songs. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as the greatest song of all time, declaring, “No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time.” In his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen remembered, “The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind”. In addition to the Rolling Stone ranking, website Acclaimed Music also ranks it #1 on its Top 3000 songs list, based on a number of reviews and “best of” lists.

Wanna learn to play the 100 Best Songs Ever Recorded? Click here!

Ok so one of my goals is to be able to play a really sick guitar solo. I remember when I went to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert and was blown away by John’s solo playing and I just knew I wanted to be able to do that. Well, it isn’t as easy as he makes he look!! But I’m well on my way and I thought I would share with you a product that really helps if you are trying to learn to solo too. It’s called Riff Master Pro and it basically takes all the badass solos that are ingrained in all our heads (Hendrix, Clapton, Page, etc) and slows them down to where us average folks can really grasp it and learn to play it. It is a super easy program and it saved me a ton of time and money from having to go out and buy all the tab books and sit down and decipher those. Believe me, that makes you want to smash your guitar right there!! Anyways, here’s a link to it if you want to check it out. Either way, keep playing!!!

Riff Master Pro

I’ve had a lot of people ask me, “Which guitar should I buy?” or “How do I know what to look for?” Well, I’ve found a great little video by my buddy David that explains what to look for, variations in different woods, sound differences, etc. Check it out below.

I own a Blueridge BR-160 (You can see it in my videos :)) and I really enjoy playing it. The wood has “warmed up” since I bought it and it sounds better everyday! Keep playing friends.

I highly recommend David’s videos and website. Many of them are free and they are excellent for beginners. He explains everything very clearly and it really helped my when I first started out (well it still helps me today to be honest).

You can check out Next Level Guitar (David’s lessons) here

Amazing guitar player and amazing person!

http://www.christiaanoyens.com.br

The Weissenborn is an amazing instrument! Just learning to play it has been a challenging and rewarding experience. The vibrations that this thing can produce are something to be heard. Unfortunatly my camera mic doesn’t do it justice!!

Here’s a little history on the Weissenborn Guitar:

This is from my friend Christiaan Oyens site. He has an amazing all weissenborn album that I can’t put down. I’ll post a video of him playing way better than me next time. Keep playing friends

We are living in a fantastic time period! With web 2.0 we can find anything our heart’s desire at the click of a button. We can schedule a flight around the world, find unbiased reviews about the latest gadget, do all out Christmas shopping, or even find a girlfriend, all on the internet (though I don’t recommend it, trust me).

Just as little as 5 years ago, if you were trying to learn the guitar, you would probably have to:

-Pay $50 an hour to have private lessons

-Buy an endless number of guitar books

-Pester your guitar playing friend to death to teach you

-Spend hours and hours listen to a CD (yes a CD!) breaking down songs you liked so you could play them

Today, my friends, you don’t have to do any of this to learn to play guitar. Honestly you don’t have to spend a dime to learn to play (besides buying the guitar) if you truly didn’t want to (though there are some great products out there that I have used to accelerate my learning that I’ll tell you about later). Today, we have YouTube!

YouTube is a huge time-saver and knowledge base for you. Here’s some reasons why:

-There are thousands of guitar instructional videos on literally anything you can ever want to know about playing the guitar

-You can post videos of your playing and get (mostly) honest feedback about your playing

-You can look up any artist and see EXACTLY how his/her song is played

-You can look up people doing covers of songs you want to learn to play and ask them questions about how to play the song (I’ve found most people to be very hospitable and friendly on helping me out with my questions)

-You can get ideas for your own songs from videos (Chord progressions, rhythmic patterns, lyrics, etc)

-You can watch concert videos

-Finally, you can see people that are worse at playing and singing than you are (yes, I promise there is someone worse than you, no matter what you think!)

Is that not amazing! The possibilities are truly endless. All you have to do is put in the time and keep at it and you will be playing your favorite songs in no time. Now my job is to help you find worthwhile videos (not all of them are good let me tell you), show you how to play some of the songs I have learned, hook you up with tabs, and tell you what stuff has worked for me and what hasn’t. I’ll do my end, now you keep up yours! It’s a great time to be learning guitar…