for beginners, guitar, piano, keyboard, singing...

Can you learn music online for free?

Should you learn music online for free?

In this video and blog post, I'm going to answer these questions for you.

If you prefer to watch and listen, come over to my YouTube channel and join me!

If you prefer to read, read on :)

As a music teacher, I have an interest in encouraging people to use music teachers - I don't want to do myself out of a job!

But sometimes it's understandable why people might be looking for free advice or resources.

I do it too. I look online for free advice for my business, for example. Sometimes it's about not having the money to allocate to it. Sometimes it's not actually high enough priority, even though you're curious to start with. So there're all kinds of reasons why you might be looking for free advice, training and resources online. And the reality is that we all really avoid paying money for something unless we can really see the value in it.

I also know that there are millions of people out there every single day, searching for information about how to learn music online. So, if you're going to try and do this by yourself for free, I wanted to share with you a few things that are really important to keep in mind if you're going to do it that way. I'm going to share with you the pros and cons of learning music this way, so if you're really determined, you know what you need to know and you can go into the process with eyes wide open.

So let's get into the pros and cons of learning music online for free. This is really for any instrument, but the instruments that I focus on are singing, guitar, keyboard, and piano. It would also apply to music theory as well.

The Pros

1. uhhh... it's free?

This is obvious. Who doesn't love free? I love free. We all love free, and there are various ways to get this free information.

There's lots of stuff on YouTube and actually some really amazing content creators on YouTube.

You can look at websites like Ultimate Guitar for example, and you can use apps. Now there are the paid apps and they're also free apps as well that you can find.

If you know what you're doing, you could curate yourself a bunch of resources that are going to help you up to a certain point.

2. Self-curation

Another pro to learning online for free is that you can really self curate exactly the pieces that you need. So you don't have to wade through information that's not relevant to you - if you know what you're looking for - and that's a big if.

The people who can learn online for free are generally people who are:

• Extremely self motivated and organized,

• Those who can really discern the good information from the bad.

• If you know what is relevant to you and what's not relevant to you

As an example, I find a lot of resources online myself. One of the things that I'm learning how to do for myself is use a software program called Loopy Pro. It's really a comprehensive program, and it has a bit of a learning curve, and it's quite techy. So it challenges me in areas that I am a little bit less developed.

And because I have a background in music, I've studied music at university, I've done a lot of research in music before, and I know what a good teacher looks like in music. I know what's relevant information and what's not relevant information. I know how to narrow things down so that I'm not flooding myself and overwhelming myself. It works for me to look up tutorials on YouTube and to look for information that way. Having said that though, if I found the right person to learn from, I wouldn't hesitate in paying somebody to give me really curated information.

But that's an example of a situation where I have the skills and the knowledge necessary to be able to curate my own information.

And that's kind of it... you can save money, and self- curate your journey in the ways you see fit at the time.

The Cons

This is going to be a little bit of a bigger list than the last one... and it actually includes one of the pros as well.

1. Self-curation.

Now, it's a con when you don't know what information you're looking for.

All you know is, "I want to learn how to sing or I want to learn how to play guitar, I want to learn X, Y, or Z song. I want to learn how to play chords on the piano."

You're going to search that up on Google or on YouTube, and you will get a wide variety of possible information that you could choose from.

How are you going to choose what information is relevant to you, when you don't know what you don't know? It's really hit and miss.

You might find some really good info, you might find a great person on YouTube and learn a lot from them. And I wouldn't discourage somebody from doing that.

But equally, you might find somebody that has a little bit of a strange point of view on something, or they teach a concept in a way that's a little bit inaccurate, or there's missing pieces in the information that - if you don't know what's missing, you don't realize that, that information is actually necessary to help you later on in the process. These are the things that good teachers do.

With the self curated path, it's never really free.

You always have to choose between time or money.

You might also be choosing between frustration or money, confusion or money, wasted time or money.

When you pay for something, you are paying for the relief from trying to have to work it out all yourself.

On the self curated free path, you're going to run into conflicting information, especially when you're a beginner. For the most part, you're kind of flying blind.

This is just a recipe for getting discouraged, getting confused, the self doubt starts to come in. You start to think that it's you, that you are the one that can't do this.

The truth is that that is not the case. You're just facing the challenge of having to curate information that is difficult for you to discern. It's not your fault, it's just that having good guidance means that you're able to avoid many pitfalls of the process, because someone can just shine the light on the way for you, on the self guided path.

2. No accountability or support

This is why I say that when the people who can do this are those who are very self-motivated and organized.

If you thrive in solitude and in that problem solving challenge mode, you're going to do a lot better at this. But if you're like me, and I liken this again to my process of building a business, I really need support in that because there's so much that I'm still learning about that process. When I have somebody holding my hand and guiding me through, there's so much relief from confusion, frustration, wasting of time, and I actually have a much better chance of getting where I want to go.

3. No personal guidance beyond the music itself

One really important piece that actually is missing in a lot of music education, whether that's free or paid, is the importance of understanding how much of a personal growth journey learning music is.

The difference between having an orientation to personal growth in the learning process of music and not, can be the difference between whether or not you persist and continue and get to where you want to go, or whether you don't.

Because you can learn all the musical information in the world that you like from any source that you want to learn it from, and you might even become accomplished as a musician.

But inevitably, music always brings up our stuff.

It brings up our self doubt, our self worth. It brings up our triggers, our assumptions, our judgments of ourselves and others. It brings up things that we are not even yet aware of within ourselves. And if we don't have a way of navigating that in the process of learning music, it's just much more likely that we're going to get lost. We're going to lose our motivation, lose our inspiration, and just give up.

And it's a really sad day when we give up on our musical dreams.

It's everybody's birthright, and that inspiration that we have that drives us to learning music in the first place, is real and it's true. So we need really constructive ways of learning to work through the process of learning so that we can realize those visions and inspirations.

If you still want to go the self-guided free route...

I know sometimes we still need to do what we can for free, because of current limitations. So, if you're going to go that route, here's a few tips to help you along the way:

Make sure that the information that you are using is reliable.

One really good way of verifying whether some information is reliable is to compare information.

So if you get one set of instructions from one website, and another set of instructions from another website, check whether there's any discrepancies in between them.

Understand that a website like Ultimate Guitar, despite the fact that it's an actually a really amazing resource - and I use it all the time in my teaching - it's crowdsourced.

So there are some tabs and charts on there that are really great, really accurate, spot on, and some that are way off.

So I really recommend if you're looking up a song on Ultimate Guitar, for example, look up a few versions of it and see what the differences are between them.

The second thing that you can do to guide your own journey is to understand what it is that is driving your motivation.

As I've spoken about before in another video, the motivation for us learning music is all about the peak experiences that we've had in music. And if we want a music practice and a music journey that has longevity and really go somewhere, we need to stay connected to that ultimate reason, that ultimate why.

So make sure that you understand that for yourself and that you have ways of staying connected to that.

The third thing that you can do is understand that learning music isn't just about learning music.

It's about under understanding yourself, knowing yourself and loving yourself more deeply.

If you want to find your expression, you need to be able to accept your own expression, to appreciate your own expression. You need to know how to let yourself love what you really love and let yourself go into that.

Understand that you're going to need personal growth tools in your musical journey, and mindset tools, and mindfulness and meditation tools in your music journey just as much as you're going to need actual musical knowledge and skills.

The last thing to keep in mind is that apps are really great, up to a point.

They're like supportive tools. So it's really important if you're using apps to learn music to only use them as one tool in your arsenal.

So - go forth, find what you need online, search YouTube, search Google.

Compare information, use apps to support your journey.

If you find yourself flailing or losing motivational inspiration, stay connected to the why of you wanting to learn music in the first place, and bring in some tools of self-awareness and personal growth to help you along the way.

I actually have a free resource for you!

It's a process on micro-practice, which can really help you bust through procrastination, lack of motivation in your music practice.

You can get it by clicking here!

If you ever need support, don't hesitate to reach out.

Love the sounds you make. Practice the beauty of sound.

Until next time ✌🏼

If you'd like more videos about music practice, and a holistic approach to learning music, then subscribe to my YouTube channel.