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Further to our discussion on the fate of the Monthly Challenge program:
I just spent the afternoon scouring the internet to see if there were any online guitar communities or forums that had anything remotely similar to the Active Melody Monthly Challenge series. Conclusion: There is not.
Yes, famous guitar communites like Ultimate Guitar and JustinGuitar and some others do have online forums, but they are not really designed as a place where beginning or intermediate guitarists can upload their videos and get feedback from other guitarists. For example, a couple of years ago I uploaded a couple of my videos to JustinGuitar as an experiment, and got feedback from about two people. I was just lost in the crowd of users who wanted to know what is the best bedroom amp or best pick to use for funk guitar.
There are a few guitar forums on Facebook, but the design of the user interface of Facebook doesn’t lend itself to setting up topics, or pages for specific genres, etc. In other words, they don’t work very well at all.
There are quite a few web-based sites where you can join up, then upload your videos and some online teacher will give you one-on-one feedback. They are often highly structured programs, and they are not cheap to join.
So it dawned on me that someone (not an elderly gentleman like myself) should just start a Youtube channel for that very purpose. Just a place where we could upload stuff and check in and listen whenever we felt like it. But the problem is (as we know) that random viewers can’t just upload a video to a Youtube channel. Google AI says this:
“YouTube does not have a native, built-in “public drop-box” feature where random strangers can log in with one click and upload videos to your channel without some level of account permission or manual handling.”
Google suggests this as a method: “You can ask people to send you videos via email or file sharing, and then you upload them to your channel.” In other words, a Dropbox (or other) download service could be set up, then people upload to that, and the Youtube channel owner would have to post them on Youtube. What a pain!So basically I have hit a brick wall in my quest to find a video-sharing guitar forum, and now I know the reason why. But I did discover that I am not alone in my quest. I found that lots of other guitarists have asked this same question, and also ran into dead ends.
Any ideas?
Sunjamr Steve
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Without in-person lessons, there is no better way than to submit video of your self playing or showing us all what your working on so we can catch some of the obvious technical issues that could be addressed right away. I have to constantly remind myself about posture, and my collapsing fretting hand. As soon as I watch myself on video, I am reminded how easy it is to slip into old habits. I can diagnose myself, but if you don’t know what you don’t know….
The other thing I always have to work on if I remember to, is to use my full dynamic range. I have a terrible tendency to pick way too hard at full volume.
Anyways, we still can share video’s right here on this forum via YouTube or Vimeo. Just might have to make up our own challenges that we have for ourself.
Two of the best challenges I participated in so far was the “Create a Hook” challenge, and this last one to “Create more space in your phrases”. So having good challenges are really beneficial to gently pushing us all forward in a positive direction.
Most everything else is going to be on the technical side, like playing well in time, faster picking speed, muting strings that shouldn’t be heard, vibrato technique, etc…
Just thought of a really good challenge. How about the bury the click challenge? 🙂
Root note patterns >>> CAGED shapes >>> TRIAD'S. Just put in the work and watch your guitar skills soar.
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Good points, Michael. I remember that at some point in the past (years ago) we had a place on the forum where members posted their ideas for monthly challenge goals. It seems to be long gone, but maybe we should try to get an official forum topic where members could suggest monthly challenge topics. It begs the question, why do we need Brian to come up with a challenge goal every month? Perhaps he would appreciate it if it could just run on automatic most of the time, and he could jump in if the spirit moves him. Sort of a “Grassroots Challenge”. One benefit might be that we could just choose a consistent day – perhaps the last Friday of every month – so we would all know when it was due. It seems like a pretty easy thing to do.
Sunjamr Steve
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Yeah, this community is unique among guitar sites I’ve belonged to. Joined Jason Loughlin’s site earlier this year…great lessons, there is a somewhat used forum there and he encourages people to use it, but not much happening any given day.
I agree, the challenges should be more regular. However it is nice to hear from Brian as the MC, so to speak.
A couple years ago he missed a month and we did an unofficial challenge…it went ok, but not as many subs as we might get regularly.
That said, there isn’t a reason we couldn’t do a Member Member’s Challenge each month. If we looked together a list of ideas I’m sure we could get that going.
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