Frequently Asked Questions (from 1996)
Joni's guitar school is a small family business that offers personal guitar lessons over the Internet. Your teacher is Joni Shuter, a guitar teacher with many years of teaching experience.
In order to learn to play the guitar with Joni, you first need to sign up for a course. Currently we offer a beginners guitar course, but we are also working on other courses. We are currently offering lesson one free of charge.
If, after evaluating lesson one, you decide to purchase lesson two, you will need to give us your credit card details so that we can charge you. We have gone to great lengths to ensure that your credit card information remains confidential. This is to protect both ourselves and yourself from potential abuse. In reality, it is ourselves and our bank who face the real risks not yourself:
It is also important to note that your credit card details are more at risk when stored on a computer connected to the Internet than they are when being transferred across the Internet. (Looked at from the hackers point of view, why monitor the Internet and try to find the odd credit card number passing through when you can break into a computer and steal a list of thousands of credit card numbers?)
To protect ourselves, our bank and yourselves from potential credit card abuse, we take the following precautions:
We are satisfied that we have done everything possible to protect all three parties from potential abuse. If you would like to verify that we are an authorized credit card merchant prior to signing up, please send us an email message.
An incredible amount of time and effort has gone into preparing these lessons. Joni is a professional guitar teacher with many years of experience teaching guitar. The lessons are of the highest quality and make full use of multimedia (sound waves, diagrams and photographs) to make your learning as effective and as fun as possible.
The greatest benefit of learning through Joni's Guitar School, however, is that you get personal feedback on your progress. With each lesson, you are encouraged to send a sound file of your playing back to Joni. By listening to your playing, Joni is able to identify things that you are doing incorrectly and tell you how to correct them. This ensures that you do not get into bad habits that are difficult to correct later.
This is a difficult question to answer as it varies from person to person depending on enthusiasm and time availability. Initially you should try to discipline yourself to, say, a minimum of half an hour daily. If you have more time then try to practice for two or three half hour sessions rather than an hour and a half at one stretch. Once you're hooked on the instrument it will automatically take top priority of your time and you'll have to worry about scheduling the rest of your life around it!
The course is designed for either:
Initially it is easier on you and your fingertips to play a nylon string guitar but this should not influence your purchase decision. The two types of guitar sound very different and it really is a matter of personal taste as to which sound you prefer. Try and listen extensively to both to determine your preference. Once you have decided which type of guitar you would like, you can either
It is false economy to buy a really cheap guitar. They are often very difficult to play; they are susceptible to warped necks (which make every chord buzz and clunk!); and I guarantee you will replace it within a few months anyway.
If you have an acoustic guitar you will need metal strings. There is a wide range of strings available and you should choose the best quality you can afford. The most important thing is to choose light metal strings (not medium or heavy).
If you have a nylon string guitar, once again choose the best quality of nylon strings you can afford. Please note that you must never put metal strings on a nylon guitar as they will damage the instrument.
You certainly don't need a fantastic voice. Everyone's singing voice is unique. It is important, however, that you are able to sing in tune.
The best way is to record yourself singing each song and then analyze if you are singing it too fast, too slow, too high or low, hanging on words too long and so on. Then make the necessary adjustments until it sounds better. Remember that very few people like the sound of their own voices. Relax, practice, analyze and build up your confidence.
If the song is pitched too low for you, the simplest way to raise the key is to use a capo which is a small device that you clip onto the neck of your guitar. Use of a capo is fully covered during the course.
Sometimes, particularly when the key is too high, it is necessary to change (or transpose) the key to suit your voice. This will also be covered during the later part of the course once you have learned a wide variety of chords.
My beginners course is designed to teach the basic techniques of strumming and finger picking. I believe it is desirable to master these techniques before trying a plectrum.
A tab (or tablature) is a simplified, diagrammatic method of writing down an arrangement for the guitar.
With the popular, rhythmic guitar songs, our voice carries the melody while the guitar plays the accompanying chords and rhythm. This normally doesn't require tabs to describe. As one progresses to instrumental guitar (without singing) where you have to play both the melody and the accompaniment simultaneously it becomes rather more complicated. Tabs are an effective and simpler method of writing these arrangements than conventional musical notation.
Simple tabs will be taught in the latter parts of the course.
Despite the fact that we are physically located in South Africa, our web site is hosted on a server in the United States. You may choose whether to download the lessons from our web site or to have them emailed to you. In either case, I am sure that you will find the response time adequate.
To make best use of Joni's guitar lessons, you need to be able to send sound files to us. This allows Joni to give you personalised feedback on your playing. Uncompressed files are very large. We would therefor appreciate it if you would compress the short sound files that you send us.
Detailed instructions for creating sound files depend on your operating system:
Windows 95
Firstly you need to enable audio compression. In Windows 95 audio compression is normally enabled by default. To set up audio compression drivers (or just to ensure that they are loaded) have your Windows 95 installation disks or CD available and follow the instructions below:
Once you have audio compression enabled on your system, you may record compressed files as follows:
Windows 3.1
The Windows 3.1 Sound Recorder does not support conversion between sound formats. You therefore need to use an alternative sound editing program. We recommend that you use Cool Edit. You can obtain it by searching for cool152 on http://www.shareware.com. You should use Cool Edit to create your sound files as follows:
Macintosh
By default Macintosh sounds come in a compressed format. The format that we are using offers slightly better compression, and is easier for us to listen to from Windows 95. We would therefor appreciate it if you could convert any files that you create for us into Windows IMA ADPCM format. It is easy to do this with SoundApp which is available from http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~franke/SoundApp. The detailed instructions for converting files into this format are as follows:
You can then send the file to us. In order to send your file to us by Internet mail, your mail program will need to "encode" the file first. Please can you ensure that it is encoded using BINHEX encoding. We are not able to easily read MacBinary files.
The attached zip files are 8 bit binary files. Internet mail only allows the transfer of standard ASCII data. When our server emails you a lesson, it first converts the 8 bit file to a standard ASCII file by using Base64 encoding. Base64 is a standard specifically for transferring binary data across the Internet. Modern mail programs (such as Microsoft Mail, Pegasus Mail and Eudora) will automatically decode the attachment and the whole process will be transparent to you. If your mail program does not automatically decode the files for you then you have a choice. You can either change your Email program (recommended) or you can manually decode the file using a program such as WinCode. Alternatively you can download the lessons from our web site.