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.