It may be hard to find positives to months of quarantine as the world reckons with a global pandemic, but the most obvious must be the newfound abundance of free time.
Many people have chosen to take up new hobbies, and the guitar is no exception. With non-essential businesses closing, either temporarily or permanently, guitar lessons have been fewer and far between for many. You can, and should, however, opt for the self-taught route.
Lance Vallis tackles the debate in his piece “Being Self Taught vs. Taking Lessons.” A major takeaway is the loss of creativity when you are taught by someone else. “There already is a Dave Matthews,” he writes, elaborating that uniqueness is what stands out in the musical world. In major musical education institutes, everyone follows the same curriculum, resulting in highly skilled players coming out, but their skillsets remaining nearly identical.
The Beatles were self-taught. Jimmy page was self-taught, Jimi Hendrix self-taught. So many of the most famous guitarists out there didn’t focus on a formal musical education but chose to form their own paths. When they did things their own way, they developed a unique style of playing, and that’s what got them into stardom.
One of my biggest inspirations on guitar, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, is quoted saying that his style of playing would infuriate the majority of guitar teachers. He simply does everything differently, and this can be attributed to his lack of a proper education. And as a result, he has created some of the most iconic tunes on the guitar.
If no one is telling you what to do as you learn, your creative potential is incredibly higher. You can literally do whatever you want as you learn and form new methods and styles that may have never been used. This is why all the greats are self-taught; they used a lack of formal education to create a sound that had never been heard.
Northeastern University’s Kerr Hall contains its biggest freshman community of musicians. Arien Wagen is one of these, an established multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas. In a recent interview, Wagen emphasized the abundance of resources aimed at learning guitar on the internet. “There are a lot of really great resources on the internet, especially on YouTube and music teacher’s websites, a lot of people have free videos posted, and I think it’s a good way to [help decide to pursue guitar].” A key takeaway of his is that its best to start out learning on your own and decide on lessons once you’ve figured some stuff out.
Although I agree with many of his points, I feel that it’s preferable to stick to teaching yourself for a multitude of reasons. Once you’ve gotten your foot in the door in terms of deciding that you’d like to learn guitar, you’ll have enough motivation to seek out the resources to continue learning, most of which are free on the internet. Guitar lessons not only take up scarce time and money, both in already short supply for young people. Lessons also can take from one’s passion and creativity, turning practice into more of a chore than a pastime.
Another member of Kerr Hall is Lena Hildrich, an amateur guitarist as well as singer. She took up guitar around a year ago to complement her vocals. Although Hildrich is self-taught, she wishes she had taken lessons while starting out. “I feel like I do things wrong and I don’t really know much music theory when it comes to specifically guitar,” she explains. She claims that had she created a better basis of guitar details, such as music theory, it would have been easier to become a guitarist.
In this day and age, everything everywhere is online. When learning guitar, it’s definitely easier to find tutorials and covers for individual songs, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go in-depth. YouTube and various websites have countless amounts of information on more advanced topics such as scales and chord progressions. It may be slightly harder to teach yourself this content when it gets more technical, however, but if you’re dedicated to learning guitar it can be done.
When I took up guitar in the summer before my senior year of high school, I was doing so entirely out of a desire to build out who I am. I had been wanting to for years, and with my dad being a lifelong musician himself, I knew the time had come. I relied heavily on YouTube for instruction, and with each song I learned it only affirmed my confidence in my skill. The feeling of reward and accomplishment after learning something on your own enforces your passion more than any lesson could.
When you teach yourself something, you’ve created something from scratch. You created a new skill of yours out of nothing, and you can claim all the credit. When you get lessons from someone, it’s something that they also created. Also, during the COVID era, since things are all online, no guitar lesson service will be as good as they are in person, so there’s less you’d miss out on.
Teaching yourself guitar is definitely quite time consuming, but with these wild times, we do find ourselves with more time on our hands. Creating a new hobby is also a way to find some mental peace, as you’re focusing on something entirely new, and creating new neural pathways in your brain. The pandemic has caused much stress amongst the populace, so a little bit of a break through playing could surely help.