Why This Program?

• Here’s the good stuff on the site:
  • Popular Sheet Music: Please start here! The first three books will teach you everything you need to know to be an effective guitarist and use more than the three chords every singer with a guitar uses on TV.
  • Classical Sheet Music: You’ve got to suffer a little bit and working through the levels in classical guitar will make you a much better player no matter what style you like the most.
  • Ensemble Sheet Music: The entire purpose of this website will be to seek out and make available better arrangements for people to play together. The biggest tragedy in guitar is how much alone time people are spending with it. Get together with friends or enemies and you’ll improve much faster and make more interesting music.
  • Modern Sheet Music: Copyright problems aside, I’m working to make as much “cool” music playable on the guitar as I can, but it’s definitely not as easy as you’d think. It’s a lot of work and people definitely love bad songs in the modern age.
  • Holiday Sheet Music: You only work on this from Halloween to Christmas Day, so it’s sectioned off on it’s own separate page.
• Certification: Prove you’re the boss.
• Classes: Live online meeting schedule is always posted on the front page of this site.
• Video Classes: Recordings of our online meetings.

Interested in why this method is the right one? Here’s a short-ish essay.

You wanna play cool songs? You have two choices:

• You can go through YouTube by yourself and copy how some dude shows you the intro to your favorite heavy metal song. You won’t worry about fundamentals or techniques, you’ll just get the notes right. Then, when you’re ready to tackle the next famous anthem, it will be more of the same hunt and peck playing. This is how teenage boys with electric guitars learn to play. It’ll have iffy results.
• Or, you can focus on proper technique and good fundamentals playing super boring songs. Suddenly, one day, you’ll be able to play everything. This is probably a better choice for most people because the songs you like today are maybe not the songs you’ll want to play a decade from now. In the end, the songs won’t matter, but owning solid guitar skills will build the competence you need to play all music on any instrument.

How to be successful:

• Practice time: You need to play everyday. Seriously. A warm-up, a little time on new material, and plenty of time to just enjoy playing at the end of your session.
• Willingness to show up: You need to play with other musicians. Seriously. It gives you ownership, deadlines, and responsibility, and you’ll play songs you’d never pick on your own.
• Getting quality instruction: Watching YouTube alone isn’t satisfactory. You need a teacher to look at what you’re doing. It’s expensive and time consuming and nerve wracking and it’ll do more than just about anything else to help you improve quickly.

Stupid things you’re likely to think:

• Standard notation is great, or standard notation is terrible.
  • Yes, we think you should know the basics of reading music.
  • No, we do not think you need to be an expert.
  • Learning to read will not make you worse.
  • We think some people are way too eager to force reading on you.
  • For guitar, standard notation alone is cumbersome at best and there are alternatives.
• Tablature is great, or tablature is terrible.
  • Yes, we think you should know the basics of reading tab.
  • It takes 15 minutes to become an expert at it.
  • We use it in conjunction with standard notation to make reading faster.
  • It’s only used to speed placement of your fingers on the fretboard.
  • We think some people are trying to make tabs as difficult as standard notation and that’s silly.
• Electric guitar vs. acoustic guitar.
  • Both are good.
  • Electric is more fun. But you have to know about amps and pedals. (Yawn.)
  • Acoustic is better for your neighbors. People don’t really want to listen to you.
  • You can have lots of acoustic players in a room, so that’s our focus.
• Classical music is harder or more important than fingerstyle.
  • Technique is technique. Every style of guitar teaches you something.
  • We treat fingerstyle the same way as classical, but we generally play more popular tunes.

How Should You Proceed?

• Start with Book 1. Obviously. Play and read everything in the book.
• Play Book 2 focused on getting TuffAxe to be your friend.
• Book 3 will give you a nice sounding repertoire quickly.
• Send me an email if there’s something that looks interesting on Book 4. (It’s not really a book, just a collection of arrangements I’ve done over the years.)
• The Classical Program is designed to be the typical classical stuff you’d learn anywhere, but with tablature, because there’s no reason not to have both systems. If you’re going to go to college in guitar and you’re a teenager. Make yourself learn classical without tablature, but if you’re anybody else, you’ll be playing much more advanced material much sooner with tabs.
  • If you want to see the best two programs for classical guitar (other than this one of course) ever in the history of civilization, you should look at Carulli Op. 241 and Sagreras Lecciones 1-7.