This month, the golden gear theme unexpectedly continued, with a bucket-list item that I thought wasn’t made any more and (I’m ashamed to admit) I’d actually forgotten all about.
And I took my first step towards trying to improve as a musician. Well, I tried, but there are problems …
Yamaha SG1802 Goldtop
A Japanese-made Yamaha with dual P90s, in a gold top finish, has been one of my bucket-list guitars since before I bought my first Gibson Les Paul.
Truth is, it’s been so long since I’ve seen one, I’d actually forgotten about it. I honestly thought that Yamaha didn’t make them any more. And then, one turned up out of the blue for the opening of my local guitar store’s new premises. (Opening day was the first time they’d stocked Yamaha guitars.)
This guitar is as good as a Gibson Custom Shop Les Paul – if not better – for the same price as a Gibson USA Les Paul. It is a little different to what Gibson offers – think 80s Charvel hot-rod vs a more traditional Strat – which gives me new sounds and new options.
TrueFire All Access Subscription
The last time I had guitar lessons in person, the instructor dropped me after just four weeks. After that horrible experience, I’ve reverted back to being self-taught. Regular readers will have heard how that’s gone 🙁
Enter TrueFire, and one of their seasonal sales where the All Access subscription is on special offer.
I’ve … mixed feelings about the experience with TrueFire so far. I’m going to break the experience down three ways:
- TrueFire the business,
- TrueFire as a teaching / student platform,
- and TrueFire’s teaching content.
Let’s start with the business side. Despite buying an annual All Access pass, I’ve been bombarded with notifications from TrueFire trying to sell me more things. I’ve had 12 sales emails in the last month … compared to just one email (the initial confirmation email) about actually learning anything. There’s no way to unsubscribe from just these sales and marketing emails either 🤬
This has definitely left a bad taste, and makes the All Access pass feel more like a bait-and-switch offering. Especially as many of the courses that I’m currently browsing have an ‘On Sale’ banner across them. Do I need to pay extra to access them? (The answer is ‘no’, but I feel that the site tries to trick newcomers into clicking that ‘buy’ button!)
Then there’s the teaching / student platform: the website and corresponding iPad app.
The iPad app is just plain awful, and simply not fit for purpose. It isn’t built to modern UI or UX standards (and I’m at that age where that starts to matter). I’m not kidding, I literally can’t use it. The fonts are too small, with poor contrast colour choices on the text, and (seemingly) no way to change the visual appearance at all.
The website’s a little better – at least it’s readable – but in desperate need of modernisation and a serious dose of QA. A couple of examples:
- The lesson content doesn’t resize properly to fit the browser window – a problem on smaller laptop screens.
- If I hide the left-hand nav menu, the video part of the lesson content fills the window, pushing the accompanying music notation off-screen.
- If the accompanying music notation doesn’t all fit on the screen at the same time (for example, there’s three rows of music notation, but only the top two fit in the browser window) the only way to see the rest of the music notation is to scroll the whole browser window – which means that I can’t see the video part of the lesson. (This seems to be a bug or a problem with how content is prepared; on some lessons, the music notation can be scrolled.)
These are basic problems that there’s no excuse for. And they’re not the only ones.
TrueFire has been going for a very long time; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s the same site that they originally started with, and it’s just evolved organically over the decades.
What about the teaching content? If the lessons are well-structured, well-presented and effective, then that will at least balance things out a bit.
The first problem is actually finding it. There’s tens of thousands of lessons on TrueFire – but only 6 offered “learning paths”. Where’s the learning path for Grade 1, Grade 2 etc music? Where’s the learning path if you want to focus on technique?
There seems to be a serious lack of structured curriculum.
So how do you learn on TrueFire? As far as I can tell, you have to know exactly what it is you want to learn, search for the right term in the search bar, and then use the filters on the left-hand side to narrow down the search results.
I’m a qualified teacher of adults, with experience of designing and delivering curriculums. Part of our role as teachers is to show students the things that they don’t know they need to learn. The ones who already know what they need to learn are your classic self-starters who can teach themselves.
The first thing I want to learn is how to add vibrato to a string bend. It’s a basic technique that I can’t do. I’ve managed to find a few lessons on string bending. In each of the them, the instructor is doing vibrato on their string bends … without explaining how to do it.
That’s … frustrating … but not a surprise.
This shortcoming is very common in skilled practitioners in many walks of life. When you’re good at something – and every educator on TrueFire is very good at what they do – it’s very easy to forget what it’s like to be an absolute beginner at that thing. If you’re teaching in person, there’s a chance you’ll learn from where your students are struggling, and realise what you’re glossing over. If you’re posting a lecture online (which is essentially what TrueFire lessons are), there’s no student feedback cycle for the teacher to learn from.
So yeah. Right now, I’m still finding my feet with TrueFire, and trying to find the right lessons on there for me. It’s been a rough start for an expensive product.
Some of my frustration is definitely because of the overlap with my own professions. I know that it can – and should be – a lot better than it is. And I also know that it’s incredibly unlikely to improve too 🙁