Learning Guitar Songs from
YouTube? Here’s Help!
YouTube may be confusing and ineffective if you’re trying to learn guitar, but it’s great for learning your favorite songs. I don’t recommend relying completely on YouTube tutorials, because working out songs on your own will enable you to develop your ear and deepen your musicianship.
But a good YouTube tutorial can provide the fastest route to playing new music—and sometimes that’s exactly what you want. To get the most out of a tutorial, though, you’ll want to take a few things into consideration.
Find the Best Tutorials
It can help to have the sheet music or look up the chord progressions to get an overall view before you begin working with a video. Check out more than one tutorial for the song you want to learn—and don’t expect every one to be accurate. Compare them all and use your ear to help determine correctness. With time, you’ll find a YouTube teacher you can rely on for quality tutorials, so if the song you want to learn is included in their list, you’re in luck. Whenever possible, choose a tutorial by the artist who composed and recorded the song.
Navigate the Video Efficiently
You can maximize efficiency by choosing videos that present a step-by-step explanation without including a lot of irrelevant chatter or lingering so long on each step that you get bogged down. If you like the instruction in a particular video, but don’t want to sit through the introduction, explanations, or storytelling every time you visit it, use the keyboard arrows to move forward or backward by 5 seconds. To advance in 10-second increments, use the letter “j.” Or, you can choose the percentage of the video you want to skip to (10% – 90%) by using the numbers 1 – 9.
On the other hand, you might find yourself struggling with a demonstration that moves too quickly for you. If that’s the case, try adjusting the playback speed in the settings option (gearshift) on the video. Changing the playback speed using this setting will not affect the pitches.
The best playback speed to start with is often .75, because you’ll get the benefits of a slower speed while retaining the feel of the song. If you’re still having trouble deciphering the audio or video at that speed, though, feel free to drop it down to .5 or even .25 for the most problematic sections.
To pause or start the video, tap the spacebar on your keyboard.
Use Your Skills!
It can be easy to focus so much on the details of something new you’re learning that you forget to make use of the things you already know. When you’re working with a YouTube video, be sure to bring in all the learning skills you’ve acquired. Remember that you’ll be most successful when you work with small bits and log in sufficient repetitions. Stop and start the video as often as necessary to do that.
Having Problems?
Don’t worry if you have problems when learning this way—there’s hope! If you’re unsure about one or more parts of a song, I can help you through my my single song support. Just send me a link to the video you’re working with and a short video of you playing the song and I’ll get back to you promptly with corrections and suggestions. If you need more help than you can get with that service, email me to set up a lesson. We’ll work it out, and it will be fun!
