Learning an entire song

[petelanger]

I hear ya! This question comes up all the time. When and how to you pursue your desire to learn full songs. Everybody here will probably give you a different answer. Learning songs is a great goal, as long as it advances your pursuit of learning your instrument. Chasing after that sound that the recording artists have produced can definitely send you down a rabbit hole. But learning to play songs, doing them in your style and making them your own is both rewarding and beneficial.

I recommend Ultimate Guitar for the tabs, I’ve had a membership going on 3 years now. I also go to Lauren Bateman and Marty Schwartz for free tutorials, several others as well.

[benbuzztonic-com]

I have to say that my biggest disappointment with TAC is that I’m not learning songs. Yes I learn the technique, the scale, the rhythm, etc and that is definitely good. I have noticed that I am getting better. Ultimately, for me anyway, it’s not about the knowledge or the skills but about the songs you can play.

I wonder why the site is organized that way. Is it because of licensing concerns? How do other sites include song lessons?

Anyway, how do others on here go past the TAC lessons to learn songs?

Thanks,

Ben

[Skyman911]

I take what I’ve learned here and search the song I want to play. I.E. Landslide guitar lesson. You’ll find many videos. Some good, some not so good. If you want to PM me, I could give you the names of some of the teachers I like. I don’t want to post here out of respect.

[LittleGene.and.Casey]

Thanks. With limited time to practice, I’m trying to determine how much of my time I should spend learning songs or just working on the daily challenge. I find a lot of weeks, I only do a couple days of the weeks challenges and spend my time working on those.

[Skyman911]

Just my two cents here, we wanted to learn guitar to play songs, so I would spend most of my time working on songs.

[DiscostewLA]

Before I got fed up with the speed of the site and stopped coming regularly, I would normally do ~10m of the daily TAC lesson as my ‘warmup’ each day. Some days I would get through the lesson quick and easy and sometimes at the 10 minute mark I would still be struggling and would decide then if I was having enough fun/growth to continue with the lesson or to switch to learning and practicing songs.

For learning songs I would look up youtube videos and I also have a subscription to Ultimate Guitar so I can find and use tabs. https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/

I have learned a ton of songs from Dave at GuitarZero2Hero – he’s awesome and the way he lays out the videos really helps me learn: https://www.youtube.com/@GuitarZero2Hero

Also just FYI – there are some songs here that you can learn from Tony: https://hub-lkx8655w8n.membership.io/

Hope this helps – rock on!

[the-old-coach]

I believe that TAC has its “lane”; its “purpose”……. It’s not meant to be everything-guitar-learning. I was a member of TAC here for three years– and I loved it– and believe it is the best place to learn all the basic, well-rounded skills needed to give your guitar journey a solid starting-point.

Keep it, use it in “partnering-up” with additional sites to learn whatever specialized ideas you have in your own guitar journey- (playing songs, writing songs, music theory itself, classical playing, recording and posting your own performances, whatever.

TAC is a solid stepping-stone, of/from which you will always have built-in skills and knowledge, which you can take with you in whatever direction you want to pursue.

[Braden]

This. wise old coach…

[albert_d]

I concur with all the above comments and sites. I would also add the Stellar Guitarist out of Australia as another companion site for songs to the others mentioned above. I’ve gotten good material from all of those mentioned.

[mikeparquin-ca]

These are interesting replies. I noticed that another discussion was about renewing membership after a few years, and wondered if the two thoughts overlap.

Would a follow-on / next step program for ‘alumni’ of TAC make sense? There would seem to be an unlimited number of genera and songs to explore more completely?