GuitarVoyage.com: My Guitar Video Lessons Site |

GuitarVoyage.com: My Guitar Video Lessons Site

It’s been god knows how many years, that friends have been telling me that I should start a subscription video lessons site.

I always shrugged it off with: “It’s too much work”, “I don’t have time”, or “I wouldn’t even know how to get that all started”. Well, it’s coming.
I’m getting all the elements in place that will make this happen.

At this time, I’m figuring out the design and organization of GuitarVoyage.com. I know it will be somewhat of a mix between Masterclass.com and Truefire.com.

The website is going to have 14 categories, which I like calling “modules”

Module 1: THEORY
Module 2: Scales
Module 3: Harmony
Module 4: Rhythm
Module 5: ET
Module 6: Technique
Module 7: Styles
Module 8: Songwriting
Module 9: Improvisation
Module 10: Rock Riffs
Module 11: Learning Songs
Module 12: Learning solos
Module 13: Get Super Star Practice Results. This is where I teach how to practice for amazing results.
Module 14: Music Benefits (a listing of studies that show the many ways people who study music benefit in many other areas of their lives from that study)

There are many things that will make GuitarVoyage.com unique. It will really stand out from any other music or guitar teaching site.

For one: I actually am a guitar teacher. It’s common among musicians to think that because they can play an instrument, that they can also teach it. It’s a misconception to think that so and so famous person or high-level session guy has put enough study into teaching and learning, to actually be efficient and effective educators. Teaching is an art that requires completely different skills and knowledge than playing guitar really well.
Students of mine went from complete beginners not knowing how to hold the guitar, to playing Smoke On the Water and Highway To Hell note-for-note as on the album in merely 3 weeks’ time.
Students of mine went from complete beginners to full-time professional musicians earning $7-8,000 with music only within 3 years or less of starting lessons with me. Some of those students also released an album and/or got their first tours lined up within those 3 years.
I wrote an intense book titled “Unlock The Extraordinary YOU: Unleash Your Learning Potential to Achieve the Life of Your Dreams”. “Unlock The Extraordinary YOU” is a well-researched book of over 400 pages, that I spent many years working on. I studied over 300 books on neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, educational psychology, and of course learning techniques to write this book. The book is a mix of that research and my own experiences and techniques that I developed in my 27 years teaching music and guitar. The manuscript is currently being proofread and edited by a friend who has Ph.D. in Educational Sciences and Educational Psychology. She was very impressed with it, so I must have done something right haha. The videos on GuitarVoyage.com and the way the learning material is structured and organized in those lesson videos is based on that research in “Unlock The Extraordinary YOU”
In preparation for the development of GuitarVoyage, I signed up for membership to more guitar instruction websites than you can possibly imagine. Every music or guitar instruction site you can think of, and every (famous) guitar player or session guy who runs a guitar instruction site, many of which you probably know, I signed up for. It was a hefty tax-deductible expense, as well as a fantastic learning experience. A learning experience how, you might ask? Well: I came up with a list of well over 100 things I thought would be major improvements to anything they offer. Some of those things I didn’t like about their sites included
1. Unstructured material. I found that many of these sites had their learning material all over the place.
2. Unfocused. Too much talking, too much going off onto a tangent, too many side deviations into unrelated topics during a lesson, …
3. Not enough repetition of material, or guidance.
4. Showing things rather than teaching things. (Showing is not teaching, as much as information is not knowledge)
5. No logical flow from lesson to lesson
6. No practice/rehearsal videos or sections. That is one of THE big things that will set GuitarVoyage apart from other teaching sites. Some of the videos will be drill videos. I wish more guitar teachers would offer this on their instruction sites. You’ll basically have as your drill sergeant.
7. The pacing off: going too fast, or not going fast enough.
8. No teaching techniques incorporated that help students learn with much greater ease.
9. … and the list went on and on. You get the idea: I did my research haha.
GuitarVoyage will, for those reasons, be able to guarantee its users much better, stronger, and faster learning results than any other provider of similar services.

I will keep you posted as things progress along.

Once I figure out the design, which I am hoping will be in a couple of days, then I need to hire a designer, then get the design to my web programmer guy, and meanwhile, produce as much high-quality content as fast as I can.

Canon M50, And Production Tools

The videos are going to be high-quality productions. I spend a great deal of money in the past weeks on acquiring a nice collection of lenses, studied like crazy about filming and photography in the past month, and rewired a part of my studio to get the best possible sound on video. I posted a blog about that last week.

I Rerouted the Audio in my Studio for Top level Audio in Skype Lessons

Been experimenting a lot in the past few days with the Canon. Am loving it.

Pimping up the ZOTZinMusic studio