Hello this is Dyce Kimura, a Miami beginner guitar teacher.  If you’re a beginner, I want you to know that I was a beginner too before I was a Miami beginner guitar teacher and I’ve worked with so many beginners. I feel you where you’re coming from, I understand your frustration. I want to get into a couple of things. So first of all, I want to talk about the technology in playing guitar on the web. Let me state the obvious, you can get the guitar teacher like myself, I’m a guitar teacher. If you can afford a guitar teacher you should get one. If you find a good guitar teacher you should really follow that teacher.

A good Miami beginner guitar teacher is few and far and wide and are hard to find. So if you find a good one – even if you can’t afford lessons every week and even if you can afford an hour a week and even if it’s 30 minutes once a month you should really try to connect with a good teacher as much as you can. If you can’t find a good guitar teacher, but you can find a mentor then you should do that. Any chance you get to physically interact with somebody that is really good at what they do and is a professional I encourage you to do that and interact with them. Go to shows, go to open Mics, go to jams, get out and see how the guitar is play. You don’t just want to learn the stuff conceptually; you want to see it in action. If you can find a good Miami beginner guitar teacher, go ahead. If you can’t find a good guitar teacher and you’re willing to pay and you have Internet connection you should try on Skype. I’ve taught people in Afghanistan. I teach people in Australia right now. I’ve got a couple of students in Brazil. If you can’t find somebody good, like a good rock ‘n roll American pro if that’s what you want to learn let’s say and you’re living in some rural town in Roanoke or Arkansas or Puerto Rico or something and you want to get really great at playing? Then get yourself a Skype teacher if you can. The best way to learn is from somebody who knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re going to show you all the corners that you need to cut and you’re going to stop going around in circles.  A Miami beginner guitar teacher can cut thru all the confusion and get you learning on the right track.

Miami Beginner Guitar Teacher Dyce Kimura

Let me talk about some technology that you can start to use and get comfortable with when it comes to playing guitar. So if you don’t already have a Miami beginner guitar teacher, you can go on the Internet and you can Google chords. If you don’t know the chords, you should learn them. If you don’t know how to put the chords together, you can go on YouTube. You can look on YouTube tutorials how to play chords. You just type in how to play D or how to play G or you can type in how to play a certain song like More Than Words by Extreme how do I play that. You type in more than words guitar tutorial or more than words guitar cover. That’s stuff I use all the time as a Miami beginner guitar teacher in my teaching business and also when I’m learning songs the first thing I do is I go to YouTube and look for a guitar cover. I also use all the technology available, so I use tabs. A tablature system is something that was not available when I was a kid growing up learning how to play guitar in the 80s. When they started doing tablature, which is just a line system of strings where they just show the 6 strings and numbers are shown where the correlating fingers go.  I go into more in depth on this topic on this blog.

So learn to read tabs or find a teacher to teach you to read tabs or watch a tutorial on YouTube. Also the software there is guitar pro and songster that are really good and as a Miami beginner guitar teacher, I use them quite often. Guitar Pro is software and then songsterr is just a website, but they both do fundamentally the same thing and I use them all the time as a Miami beginner guitar teacher. You can buy the software, the guitar pro it’s like 60 bucks for a lifetime. I’ve seen it on Amazon the cheapest is 50 bucks. And then songster is like a subscription, its 10, 12 bucks a month. But what it does is it just plays a song back at you, but it plays it and you can see the tab move while it’s playing. So it will show you the notes – in guitar pro it will actually show you the notes and underneath that it will show you the tabs on the guitar positioning and you can actually crawl through that and you can print it out. You can isolate the instrument that you’re practicing. So if you want to know just lead guitar you can only hear that and not the keyboards and the singer and the organs and the backup guitar and the bass and the drum you just get the guitar. You can slow down the tempo so you can go all the way down to 50% or even 25% speed. You can isolate it like, I already said. You can loop it, which means you just do – maybe you want just like 8 seconds you just keep looping it and practicing it and slowing it down while you’re isolating it and you can print out the charts. You can do amazing stuff. Man! If I had that when I was a teenager I don’t think I would ever come out of my room. So much of my money got spent on buying CDs and buying books, because back then you had to buy the book like the tablature. The tablets would be in the book, but I didn’t have software to play it back to me. So understanding the rhythm was always difficult you had to listen to the CD which was at full speed; but now you can slow down the speed and still keep the integrity of the song, so it’s pretty amazing.

Also, there are apps for your smart phone. I don’t use any of them because I am not a student but rather a Miami beginner guitar teacher.  However, I have a couple of them downloaded. I know there’s like a chord app I have for free, scale app… There are apps that some of my students have that can actually take a song – it will take an MP3 that’s already in your phone and slow down the song without changing the pitch. And so if you’re learning a song you can l use that. For me, that’s kind of pointless, because as a Miami beginner guitar teacher I use guitar pro or songsterr and that slows it down without changing the pitch as well. So it’s kind of a new point, but it’s definitely something that you should do.

I just want to talk to you about the importance of getting guidance, because let’s say – I’ve been playing 30 years, so let’s say I’ve been playing for 30 years, but I’m just a little bit off in my knowledge or my ability or if I’m a rocket ship my trajectory is just 1° off of just one little thing. Maybe I never learned how to play dotted 8th note or I never learned to do the back beat – for years I struggled with that, by the way. But just one little thing, that’s like no big deal he doesn’t know how to do a back beat, but everything else is looking great and that little thing, that’s like not a big deal in your second year or 6 months of playing. But then you just keep perpetuating that mistake  and that one thing, that 1° off actually in your trajectory in your rocket ride it actually becomes like this huge distance over 5 years or 10 years or 15 years because it never got fixed. And so when your whole play life kind of – actually being defensive of your weaknesses or defensive of the areas where you weren’t good. So it’s really important to find a good teacher that’ll teach you just enough to stimulate you, but also encourage you enough to feel confident that if you go to your teacher weekly you’re getting just enough victory and everything you’re working on to feel confidence or content and happy about your progress in guitar. But also, there’s just enough exposure to the unknown and hopefully your teacher’s exposing you to things that are making you uncomfortable where you’re actually out of your comfort zone and stepping into new rhythms and new chords and guitar solos and new scales and new modes and new ways of playing, new ways of thinking, different guitars, different amps, acoustic versus electric. I mean, there are so many ways that your Miami beginner guitar teacher could start to stimulate you and encourage you in a way that’s actually going to excite you.

Miami Beginner Guitar Teacher Experience

So hopefully you’re getting that and the reality is this is too big of a concept to figure it out all by yourself especially if you’re really serious about it. If you’re really serious about getting good at your instrument and you don’t want to waste your time or you don’t want to waste your life then it’s going to really help to get some wisdom from a Miami beginner guitar teacher. By the way, there are some great courses. You can go online and go to truefire.com and they have amazing courses on true fire. You can go to udemy.com; obviously, all over YouTube is courses. I offer a couple courses on my website dycekimura.com for beginners and also for lead guitar, but there are courses all over the place. So it’s a lot cheaper than lessons; anywhere from 10 bucks to 300 bucks you can get comprehensive courses that are going to help you learn to play and give you real guidance. So you should take advantage of that. I didn’t have that stuff in the 90s, in the 80s when I was learning to play I couldn’t get online. I know I sound like an old man griping about having to walk up hill every day to go to school but it’s true. So take advantage of all of that.

So I just want to talk about the way to learn; especially if you’re learning online or let’s say you’re learning from teachers and maybe – I encounter this a lot as a Miami beginner guitar teacher I’ll get students that they’ve been learning for a couple of years and they’ve taken a bunch of courses and they kind of learned a few things from YouTube stuff and then they kind of figure some stuff out by themselves and then they bought a couple of books and then the book told them to do this and that and the other, so they kind of chased that for a while. But what happened was, they learned a little bit about site reading, let’s say, learned a little bit about 8th notes and then they got a course on scales and they went and memorized like the F minor harmonic minor scale. And then they got on YouTube and some guy taught them to play Gloria or something some GCD song, let’s say, and then maybe they figured a few songs out, maybe they can play Leonard Skinner’s Sweet Home Alabama or something. So they’ve got all this hodgepodge of stuff and none of these ideas are connected or interchangeable it’s not like, “okay, you know this core foundation let me build off that and learn one more thing.” Instead it’s all kind of spread out and that’s really dangerous, because it doesn’t give continuity to you and why do I use such an extreme word alike ‘dangerous’? Well, the reality is your guitar playing, your desire to play guitar as a beginner or advanced or pro it’s all driven by this flame of this desire to want to be good or want to be great or succeed. And if you lose of the desire, you’re done, you’re absolutely done. So some people they worry so much about doing it correctly and making sure their learning it the right way or the proper way and instead of having fun they stifle the fun and actually just focus on doing the most painful thing they can. They think it’s like exercise the more it hurts the better it is. And I would challenge that thinking I would say,” you know you really should chase your passion. You want to stroke your flame into a roaring fire.” So if you have a little candle of the desire to play guitar and as a Miami beginner guitar teacher if I can stoke that flame to become a roaring fire I can feed anything into that fire and you won’t flinch, you won’t quit, you won’t to back away. I could give you a complicated song and that flame, that desire will overcome that song. I could give you a complicated scale and some music theory your desire to play it even though it’s a difficult and it’s heady and you work on it you could actually persevere and overcome that challenge. But the opposite is also true, if you stifle that desire or that flame with not having victory every week in the things you’re attempting to do you’re going to start to get discouraged. You’re going to say, “I tried to learn this, I tried to and that.” And I see that all the time in students; they tried a little bit of this, they tried a little bit of that, they couldn’t quite figure out the rhythm, they couldn’t get that back beat, they couldn’t get the 8th note. And they tried and it’s been years now at this point and they spend all this money – thousands of dollars on gear, on guitars and various teaching situations and a Miami beginner guitar teacher and books and courses and it’s like they’re just hacking away and it’s just not happening. And so in attempt to really justify all these years of money and work and pain and passion they’ll go out and do something really hard like I’m going to learn Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing and it’s just some crazy unattainable goal. And then they just throw everything they’ve got in there and just put on the blinders and really, really try. And then of course, like three months later it’s just not coming together they couldn’t make it happen and they bit off more than they can chew and they weren’t content with just doing what’s right in front of them. I think someone is going to the gym – you go to the gym and you can only lift 100 but the goal is to lift 300, so you just put 300 and you start moving; well, you’re going to get hurt obviously. If you can only lift 100 maybe your goal should be like 105, you don’t want to lift 300. But people do that with music and I see it all the time and it’s really dangerous. So it’s kind of like… music is a language. If you are teaching somebody how to speak a language and if teach you like say the cat sat on the mat and then I teach you the next word and I teach you the word black and say the black cat sat on the black mat and then I teach you the word big and we say the big black cat sat on the big black mat. You see every new word I give you has continuity in the words you already know how to use and it fits into your sentence and your immediately using and speaking it. But if you’re like frustrated with being a beginner English speaker and you’re like, “Man! I really want to learn a complex word so I really can feel like I’m accomplishing some serious English.” And you go open up thesaurus and you learn a new word and its ubiquitous and you say, “Teacher, I’ve learned a new word, ubiquitous, you’ve got to teach me this word and how to use it.” And it’s like okay you’ve got the black cat sat on the black mat, but then you’ve got ubiquitous and it’s like in the middle of nowhere it doesn’t connect to anything and all it does is validate your desire to do something complex or profound and people actually go their own learning career as beginner or intermediate with this kind of thinking, with this idea of not connecting.

Miami Beginner Guitar Teacher Tips

So as a Miami beginner guitar teacher, just to close this up for beginners I have this funny shaped object that’s like decoration for my table in my dining room, but this is like a ball. Pretend this ball is like your knowledge on guitar and if you learn something new – so you learn like a minor chord and then you learn cords that go with a minor, let’s say, like C and G and D and F maybe and then you heard a song in A minor like House of The Rising Sun, that’s not really a beginner level song but let’s just call it that. And then you learn a couple of songs in A minor and you learn the chord in A minor and let’s say you learn an A minor scale like an A minor pentatonic on the 5th fret in the root position. So everything you are doing is in A minor. Then the next thing I would teach you is maybe another song in A minor or maybe an A minor groove, but something a little more upbeat or maybe another position in an A minor scale. But all of a sudden you grab something like D sharp mixolydian and you’re like, “man! I learned this and I learned D sharp mixolydian.” Well, they don’t touch, that’s like ubiquitous with the black cat on the black mat, you following what I’m saying?

So if you’re out there and you’re watching me on this video and you’re like, “how do I navigate the Internet telling me all this crazy stuff that I need to learn and I’m just feeling overwhelmed by all this information that’s coming at me 24/7?” Well, just imagine you are playing is like this ball and just add – like I’ve shown you – like one word at a time. Only accept things that you can really understand and know how to use. If it were a language, do the same thing. Music is a language, so learn things that pertain to your language. And that’s how you’re going to build a strong knowledge base that you know how to use in everything that you’re doing right now and that’s going to give you confidence and authority. That’s really the best advice I can give you in terms of navigating through the wild, wild the Internet.  Click here if  you want more information on how to become a pro guitar player.