The internet offers countless Guitar Forums, Guitar Communities, and guitar-related Facebook Groups providing advice to all levels of guitarists from complete beginners to advanced players. But are they worth joining? Let’s find out…
How Online Guitar Communities Work
This will vary depending on what Forum/Community/Facebook Group you join, but fundamentally, they are free to join and, keeping things simple, either public or private. If they are Public, you can usually instantly join and post, private forums require you to register and then if all is well, you are welcomed to the group and can post.
They all have some level of gatekeeping, either an administrator or an administrative team. They will check all posts before they are published or, more commonly, members can report any post that doesn’t comply with the Rules of a particular beginner guitar forum, such as no spam, no advertising, etc., etc., which will then be removed resulting in a warning or a complete ban.
Should You Join?
Well, yes and no! There is one huge problem with every guitar Facebook Group, Forum, or Online community in that it’s usually a case of the blind leading the blind. This is especially the case with beginner and intermediate-level guitar forums.
Even though the majority of members have the best interests of everyone in the community, because they are themselves fumbling around trying to find the answers to common problems, they often give terrible advice. Here’s a very common example…
“I’m completely new to the guitar, what should I learn first?”
The number of times I have read ‘Seasoned Players’ advising absolute beginners to start by learning every note of the fretboard, learning a major scale in two positions, or learning to read music is truly amazing. Beginners need to learn things that are instantly useful and gratifying, why on earth does a beginner need to know what the note on the eleventh fret of the B string is? They won’t be playing that note for months, and even then, they won’t need to know its name.
This is a typical example of the ‘best advice’ given on these forums. The member who answered obviously had an ‘everything has suddenly fallen into place’ moment when they learned all the notes on the fretboard and wished that they had learned them earlier. But I promise you they didn’t learn them before they could strum a simple rhythm pattern or play a few chords.
Based on this advice the beginner then starts laboriously learning the notes up and down the neck, which is boring at the best of times. But they have no frame of reference, if they had taken their time, gone through everything in the correct order, and learned some other basic theory such as octaves first, the whole process would have been accelerated beyond belief, as I explained in my look at How to Learn the Guitar Fretboard in 90 minutes.
Let’s take a look at another commonly asked question…
“Can I Learn to Play the Guitar using YouTube?”
The answer is usually something like, “Yes you can, I’ve been playing for two years and have never had a lesson, I learned it all off YouTube!” You then watch one of their performance videos and their skill levels don’t even compare to someone who has had structured lessons for three months.
Learning the guitar from YouTube is extremely difficult to do by yourself. YouTube contains just about everything you could ever want to learn on the instrument. But it’s next to impossible for a beginner to know the correct order to learn everything. They love a particular song, so they search for it and have a go at playing it, but it’s far too hard for them at this stage, they then give up on it and think that they lack talent on the instrument.
A teacher wouldn’t teach them that song at that stage because they know the pupil will struggle, instead, they teach them songs or parts of songs by the same artist or band. Then over time, harder songs by the same artist, before eventually teaching them the song they love, when they are good enough to play it.
The YouTube method is demoralizing for the pupil, while the teacher method is motivating.
Another thing I am always reading on electric guitar forums is that the greats taught themselves to play, for example, Jimi Hendrix. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that he didn’t have a formal guitar teacher, but do you think that he magically worked out how to tune a guitar, then using his ears, worked out where to put his fingers for every chord and how to play every scale?
No, he didn’t. He used books, and records, and asked any guitarist who was better than him, which at the time, was everyone, to show him things. Simple things like basic chords, 12-bar blues patterns, scales, etc. He watched, listened, learned, and practiced like a demon. When he was good enough to jam with other guitarists, he learned everything they knew, then moved on to learn from better and better musicians as he continually improved his skills.
That isn’t the same as typing ‘How to Play ??? (insert song name)” into YouTube and trying to play it as a beginner, and failing completely. Hendrix was self-taught, but not in isolation, he used everyone around him to improve, and most definitely didn’t lock himself in a room with YouTube for company.
And finally…
“I’m really struggling to get my F chord to sound good, any advice?”
The usual answer from nearly everyone on this is to simplify it, i.e. don’t learn the barre chord properly, but play it using only a few strings.
This obviously makes the chord far easier to play, but in fact, you are just wasting your time. The ‘simple’ version of the chord is more than likely never used in any song because the guitarist who played that song had spent the time to learn to play the chord properly.
F major is arguably the most important chord you will ever learn on the guitar because it opens up the neck to play all the E-shaped barre chords and their variations. But instead of just digging in and learning to play it properly, the advice given on forums and guitar communities is to play a baby version of the chord. This is terrible advice!!!
If a song that you want to play contains an F and you can’t play the chord yet, forget that song. You don’t have to learn that song at this stage, learn another one by the same artist or band that doesn’t contain the F chord for now. Then when you’re ready to fully commit to learning the chord properly, learn the song. That will be your motivation for going through the headache of making the F chord sound good.
To Summarize
As you can tell, listening to most of the advice given by players who are at the same level as you or even further behind has its pitfalls. At best, you might waste a few weeks learning something that you didn’t need to, at worst, it will make you give up the instrument completely.
This is the reason why I have never included a community in any of my teaching products, even my high-end customized guaranteed results plan doesn’t have a community. The reason is simple, even though everyone on the course is highly motivated, left to their own devices they will share bad habits that they have picked up. I then have to be the almost full-time gatekeeper of the community correcting members when they give bad advice, which isn’t a nice thing to do. Therefore, no community, no problems.
Exceptions to the Rule
As always there are exceptions. I have mainly concentrated on beginner and intermediate guitar forums for the content of this article. When you move up to guitar communities aimed at advanced/professional players, the advice given is of a much higher standard. Members of such groups can actually play the instrument well and have years of experience to share. They also tend to not suffer fools gladly, so if someone offers terrible advice, it is usually shot down in flames very quickly.
If you’re at this level, or when you get there, I highly recommend some of the better-quality forums and groups aimed at advanced guitarists.
Wrapping it Up
That’s it for my look at the advice given on acoustic guitar forums and Facebook Groups. If you’re starting your exciting guitar journey, my best advice is to take everything you read with a huge pinch of salt. If it sounds convincing to you, try it, but if it doesn’t work, it could be down to the bad advice, not your ability, so don’t let it hold you back.
Learning to play the guitar is difficult, with 90% of players giving up within three months of starting as was revealed in a recent survey by Fender. Don’t be one of those statistics, keep an open mind, carefully consider any advice you get, and make the right decisions to master the instrument, not decisions that will make you leave it in a corner somewhere gathering dust.
