This Cautionary Tale is For All the Guitarists Out There
Beginner or Pro
This is a bit of a rant I gave on Facebook earlier. I hope it will be helpful for beginner guitarists. But more importantly, I hope it is a cautionary tale to experienced musicians. When a beginner asks for your help, it’s not the time to display your superiority. You don’t need to prove to the world that 20 years’ experience is better than 2 weeks. We get that. Help the person out, or shut the fuck up.
In this case, an obvious beginner had posted that he was thinking about giving up guitar because he couldn’t learn bar chords. (Or for you purists, barre chords, but please refer to the last sentence of the first paragraph before you say anything.)
I’d seen several posts of his before and three things were glaringly clear. First, English was not his first language, so he wasn’t expressing his frustration in the best way. Second, he was a true beginner. I would say weeks, if not days. But third, that his head was filled with all this stuff that he supposedly needed to know to be a true guitarist. Bar chords, scales, and theory being just a few.
By the time I saw the post, it had 184 responses. I’d seen enough of these type posts to know that those 184 would be pretty evenly split, three ways.
- People being helpful in their…
