Point, Click, Jam Unfortunately For Most, Learning To Play The Guitar From The Internet Isn’T Quite As Easy As 1-2-3

When I was 8, I begged my parents for a Cabbage Patch Kid. I wanted one of those pug-nosed, yarn-haired dolls more than a visit from Duran Duran.

I whined. I pleaded. I left dog-eared toy catalogs around the house.

A couple of decades later, it was a guitar I coveted. Becoming more subtle with each passing year, I said things to my husband like, “Look, honey, there’s the music store” and “There’s a Christmas special on acoustics.”

Mind-reader that he is, he got me the guitar. Trouble is, I didn’t know how to play.

I considered finding a teacher, but that sounded too expensive and time-consuming. I bought a book and made it to page 52 before realizing I still couldn’t play “Kumbaya” if somebody held a gun to my head.

So I turned to the Internet. If it could help me find a job, book a hotel and send a birthday gift to my mom, surely it could teach me to play the guitar.

The sheer quantity of Web sites offering guitar lessons is staggering. They range from the most basic, text-only pages to real-time, interactive group and individual lessons complete with sound and pictures. Most sites are free, but some charge per class. (Around Spokane, an average private, half-hour lesson costs about $15.)

There are sites that will teach you Joe Satriani’s arpeggios and give you tips from Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett. Some plumb the intricacies of theory and technique, while one walks users through the baby steps of guitar know-how with a cheerful, animated stick figure named Sticky.

Now, that’s more my speed.

Guitar teachers are starting to see more students looking to the Internet for help — not always a good thing, they say.

“I just had a guy come in yesterday to sign up for lessons after he tried to do it (online),” said Roy Jackson, owner of Spokane’s Learn to Burn music school.

“I’m sure you get all the information, but the one thing you don’t get is hands-on experience … You’re not going to get any technique. You’re not going to get how to hold the guitar. Music is not just about reading notes. It’s not just about playing a chord.”

Longtime Spokane guitar player and teacher Joe Brasch said Internet students need to make sure their information comes from knowledgable sources.

“If you, by chance, get off on the wrong foot, those are patterns you have for the rest of your playing,” Brasch said. “There are going to be sites with people out there that are quite good at what they do. But, like anything else, I think it truly is a market of buyer beware.”

Dr. Mike Ryan, a Spokane family practitioner, has been playing the guitar for 37 years. He takes lessons just about every week and supplements his classes with what he finds on the Internet.

He took a five-week vacation recently but kept up his skills by logging onto guitar sites from his motor home.

“I’ve picked up a lot,” said Ryan, whose favorite sites include guitarplayer.com and truefire.com.

But Ryan said it would be tough to master the guitar without the help of a living, breathing, nondigitized teacher.

“If you’re a natural you could,” he said. “But the average guy is really just going to get a whole bunch of bad habits.”

Riffinteractive.com comes about as close to that calloused-fingered guitar teacher as is possible on the Net.

The Seattle-based site offers live, interactive lessons with a teacher who sends out audio and video files for students to follow along. The tracks can be slowed to any speed for the less-than-nimble-fingered and each note is marked, Mitch Miller-style, on an animated guitar neck.

Several other sites have purchased the Riff Interactive technology, including Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, which hosts weekly lessons.

Last week some 20 people joined the live lesson at Riffinteractive.com, hoping to learn Brian Setzer’s licks.

Just like a real lesson, the teacher showed up about 15 minutes late. Students spent the time cyber-chatting about guitar equipment.

Most said they preferred Internet classes to face-to-face ones because of cost and flexibility. If they miss a live class, the lessons are archived on the Web site.

One user from Omaha, Neb., with the cyber-handle “fourmanshed,” said he has played guitar for 12 years with only one real-life music lesson: “He told me to buy all these books so I quit.”

Former Microsoft employee and lifelong guitar player Michael Johnson is president of Riff Interactive and teaches many of the live classes. The site launched two years ago, and Johnson hopes to one day make the technology available to cash-strapped school music programs.

Back at the interactive class, Johnson sent out a sound file with some licks in the key of G for us to practice.

Maybe “us” is a misnomer. He sent out some licks for the rest of the class to practice while I stared blankly at the screen. Now what’s the fingering for a G chord again? Maybe this was a bit too advanced for me.

Where’s Sticky when you need him?

Like sitting through a calculus class when you haven’t mastered addition, I continued to watch the lesson march ahead. I like to think my classmates were equally confused, but I don’t know whether they were jamming away or slamming their guitars against walls in frustration.

“Being anonymous is a great benefit, especially for beginners,” Johnson said. True, but I suspect a real-life instructor would’ve caught on that I wasn’t actually playing.

And then, right after I learned that Brian Setzer plays a G120 Gretsch, it happened. Frozen. Unable to render video. IVSO decompressor not found.

Time to reboot. And time to let my fingers do the walking in search of a guitar teacher who requires less RAM.

This sidebar appeared with the story:

ON THE WEB

Guitar lessons

Type “guitar lessons” into any search engine and you’ll get a gaggle of sites. Here are some of the best:

www.riffinteractive.com: The granddaddy of them all, the technology on this site has been bought for use by several others, including www.emplive.com. Users can log on to live lessons twice a week and check out archives of past lessons anytime. This one’s not for use on that dusty Apple IIe you may have around, as there are plenty of memory-hungry audio and video files to download. Check out the site’s link to jimi-hendrix.com/guitar/GuitarBook- TableofContents.asp for a good, basic introduction to the guitar.

guitar.com: This new site taps some of the biggest names in music for streaming video lessons. While many of the sessions turn out more like an interview than an actual class, they’re awfully interesting, and you just may pick something up you didn’t know before.

www.netmusicschool.com: The home of Sticky, the happy, guitar-playing mascot. You can log on for one free beginner lesson, but after that it’s $8.95 for a four-lesson package. This site is for true beginners. You won’t find Eric Clapton jamming with Sticky here.

www.autoroute.net/guitar/: For instant gratification. The first lesson teaches you single-string riffs from famous tunes like the “Batman” theme, “Satisfaction” and “Smoke on the Water.” Impress your friends.

www.guitarplayer.com: The Web home of the magazine, this site delves into some of the more picayune topics of playing. Campfire strummers, this is probably not your bag. But if you want to know about superimposed Maj7b5 arpeggios or weaving triads or octave displacement, this is the place for you.

- Heather Lalley