Hello! tonebase has asked me to do a recommendation video, and I am happy to do so. But first i'm going to talk about myself, because it's important what I have to say. I am a long-time guitar player. I started playing guitar when I was 8 years old, and as you can tell, I'm a lot older than eight now. Not only have I been a player, I have worked as a professional guitar player for most all of my life. I started out in a garage band, like many of us — we all have very similar stories — and eventually I began to study classical guitar, so I became a good reader, and then I was fortunate after I graduated from high school that I went into the Navy Band and worked as a guitarist in the Navy Band for 30 years.

So that maybe attests a little bit to my experience I think, and also the fact that I'm a versatile player. So why would a person who has played for so long be a member of tonebase — because there's a lot of beginner stuff there? Well for one thing, as a teacher, you know, I’ve lost count over the years of how many times I've learned something from a seven-year-old who comes in and says “oh you know, I tried it this way,” and I would go, “Well that's a great idea, I wish I thought of it! Here, I should pay you for the lesson!” You have to always remain open to learning. You need to learn at every single opportunity. It matters not where it comes from. And tonebase is a great place to do that.

There's two things: there's a wealth of knowledge there from these other players. So many subjects are covered from beginner to intermediate, even some advanced work, and you just stay open to that. You learn from it. And another aspect of that is even if you know a lot because you’ve worked at guitar, and you’ve studied and you’ve thought about what you're doing and how to do things and develop your technique — because we're always our own best teacher — but you'll find your ideas, because you have so many opportunities and so many guitarists that you can watch and listen to about how they do things (or technique or whatever), it'll validate your ideas that you have. So it's twofold, you know: you'll learn new things, you validate the things that you've learned, that you've learned over the years.

So I highly recommend tonebase to everyone. Not only is it a great learning opportunity, it's a great community