Achtung! Dieser Artikel ist in Englisch geschrieben. Das ist kein Fehler, sondern soll so sein!
Hi there… I just wanna share some experience I had the last days!
Well… I feel like I am “stuck” since about 20 years at my guitar playing level and never decided to really do something about it. I took some personal lessons last year around this time. But I felt like being at the wrong teacher and to waste my time. Not that I think he is general bad. But I felt he was very unorganized and like to talk more than to help me getting better with techniques. Instead of that I got a lot of new insight into music theory. But that did not help my 2 hand coordination, speed or phrasing.
About a week ago I run into the site of Tom Hess (www.tomhess.net) and my very first impression was: Omg… what a big promotional effort to sell some lessons you can get anywhere even for free on the net.
Next thing was that I watched some movies and read infos. I was pretty unsure about the whole thing. Can that work? Who the “beep” is that guy and so on… But then I saw this video where he says: Well if you search for another shallow lessons guy.. you are wrong with me. In fact you are wrong if you don’t like me or what I say 
After some short time I registered with that site… and got my very first lesson not very long after the billing went through. First impression: Well.. dunno.. nice lesson but are they really what I need at this time? May it just be automatic send out? … still thinking that I started listening to more materials (he has very cool mp3 courses and is a very great motivational speaker!)
Then I started with one of the practice examples: 2 Hand Coordination.. Some really easy G Major scale. But with directional picking. After my “misunderstanding” that I have to learn strict alternate picking even on string changes… that was surprising. I felt like: Omg.. practiced that alternate stuff just to find that directional is much easier and faster and being thought by some experienced teacher.
I did not even checked out the other material. Just started with that simple exercise. Some (most?) of you will laugh when I tell you that I could hardly play those 2 Bars of total 36 notes (16th tripplets in 3/4) with about 40 BPM. In the fastest sound example which comes with that lesson it is played at 130 bpm. So I was demotivated a bit right in the beginning. But I still started to practice it…
At the same time I got toms speech and mini courses about the one hand is slower problem, about how to practice for real, about motivation, how you need to define goals to strife for. About how many mental things may create more problems than physical stuff.
Well it is now 7 days later and I am at 58 BPM of playing that scale clean and it feels like I can do more every day easily. I had some drawback because I was advancing to fast and I caught me with not playing really “clean” (more some hammer’ons with picking at the wrong time). So I was going back to very slow. Isolated the problem where I had sloppy play (my smallest two fingers.. and only on the highest two strings while playing upwards.. suckers). All of this is of course the reason for practicing 2 hand coordination.
That said I remembered what I did write in my “check in” survey I had to fill out then I registered for his lessons. And suddenly it strikes my mind: Those lessons I got are in fact related to what I wrote are my goals and my current problems. They are for sure in the way on the road to my final goals! That may sound easy. But he made me confident about that. Which makes it “worth” practicing it! Thats different to having 5 books and 100 of video lessons on the net which all “may help you”.
Maybe somebody want to try it out… You could tell him that I (Hans Raaf) referred you (it has benefits to find new people). But you don’t need to. It is just that I think now that it is a great opportunity to be part of that! It is not cheap! Actually it may be the most expensive lessons you can “buy online” (up to nearly $3000 a year for weekly lessons!).
P.S.: This is not meant as advertisement. I am fairly new with that type of lessons and may stop it at some time for whatever reasons. But then.. I think someone who did not hear about it may be happy for that information! There is so much crap on the net… and it is easy to loose orientation and goals.
- Hans
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