Episode 07 - Becoming a Self-Taught Guitarist

In this video I tell my story of how I became a self-taught guitarist and give you advice on how to teach yourself to play the guitar. At the end of the video I perform a short duet by Fernando Carulli.

You can also use this video to improve your English.

Transcript:
I'm a self-taught guitarist. When I was growing up I would spend hours and hours and hours in my room practicing the same songs over and over and over again. I never thought about getting a teacher. The guitar was something personal, something I wanted to do by myself. When I discovered that I wanted to play the classical guitar I realised that it was gonna be much more difficult to continue without a teacher.

My biggest surprise was when I discovered that I would have to know how to read music. Up to this point I had been picking up songs mostly by ear. The songs were simple and it was easy. But now I was interested in more complicated pieces. It's funny. Music was one of the classes I didn't like at school and now I was on my way to becoming a musician. The first step was to buy some guitar method books to learn how to read music. At the same time I started collecting albums of the most famous classical guitarists and bought the sheet music of the songs that I wanted to play.

I think that the advise that I would give to anyone who wants to teach himself or herself to play the guitar could be applied to many other skills.

Although I became quite proficient at reading music it was very important for me to memorise each piece. It was only after I had memorised a piece that I felt that I could really play it well.

I didn't realise how badly I played until I started recording myself. It helped me a lot. And playing in front of a mirror was also very useful. If I had had a video camera when I was learning to play the guitar I'm sure I would have done something like this.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• english teacher
• english
• language consultant
• classical guitar
• guitarist
• self-taught

[myprofe]

Thanks for commenting on my video.

[myprofe]

Play the parts that are difficult to memorise as slow as possible.

[myprofe]

The piece is Estudio 18 by Fernando Carulli. As you can see it's a very easy piece to play. The difficulty was synchronising the two parts. It would have been much easier with another guitarist.

[aumjey]

@SeGaSaTuRn1994

Thanks for the advice. I read musical notation and try to memorise bar by bar by repeating the bars. .Each day two or three bars and so on. This process is very slow but it is recommended to be effective. I do follow this method.Visualisation the scores without playing the guitar is another method and highly recommended but it is not easy.What you say is true and is a similar process which I practise.. Hope to retain the pieces by this method.

[SeGaSaTuRn1994]

@aumjey best way is read 1 bit of TAB that whatever song your learning keep going over and over and over on it whilst listening to the song aswell keep rewinding it and keep learning tht piece till you get perfect, then move on to next bit keep going till you do it, it just comes to you naturally belive me. guitar just sticks in your head the more you play it

[SeGaSaTuRn1994]

very true this man, you cant beat learning yourself. dont matter what style of guitar whatever your into just sit there and practice over and over, till you get it 1st chords, then bars then power chords, then riffs, scales, then comes pinch harmonics along with natural harmonics, i play METAL stuff like Metallica, i started out allmost 1yr back now and im way advanced by a long way i can tap and allsorts, very proud were i am at up to now, guitar has got to be something you really want to do.

[demejiuk]

very inspiring sir well done to you!

[MonkeyWildCat]

Your guitar playing is beautiful!

[aumjey]

Veru Interesting. Can you give tips on how to memorise pieces. Thanks