Bad guitar

Mr Fuzzbutt

My housemate is not very good at playing guitar. I think he gets all his lessons from YouTube so he doesn't actually get any feedback.

How can I get him to take proper lessons without being a huge dick about it?

minirhyder

"Hey bro, I heard about this free online course being offered by Coursera, maybe you should check it out, it seems pretty cool."

Darkewolfe

For the most part you can't. Lessons are expensive. I'm sure he knows they'd be a good idea if he went to them, but he probably doesn't want to dish out for them?

Unless you want to offer to pay. "Dude, your guitar playing is so fucking awful. Here's $200, go take a month of lessons for the sake of my sanity."

That might combine the right balance of dickishness and charity.

Unknown

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Mad Jazz

You might have better luck asking him to modulate the volume or timing of his playing. How long has it been since he picked it up? If he's been playing for less than a year, then yeah, odds are good that he sucks. But so does everyone, at first. Also, if he doesn't know about www.justinguitar.com, point him that way. I wish I had known about it when I first started.

Also, learning to play guitar from the internet is a totally doable thing if you put in the practice time and have some good musical examples to listen to. I say that as an entirely self taught guitarist who used tabs exclusively and has been complimented on my playing by people not obligated to do so.

Khavall

Remind him that he can always get a headphone amplifier. It's a little thing that plugs into the jack in a guitar and gives you a sound of an amped guitar but just to a 1/8" jack, so you can just plug your headphones in, basically.

Cambiata

Everyone is shit when they start an instrument. If he listens to guitar music at all (and I would suspect he does, since a large majority of pop music today is based around the guitar), he knows what good guitar sounds like, and that he doesn't measure up yet.

I agree with the option of asking him to turn it down or use headphones so you don't have to hear (assuming it's an electric guitar he's practicing on).

Darkewolfe

At the same time, as a terrible guitar player myself, one of the great things about a guitar is plugging into an amp and making your sounds into real space.

It's no prob to try to work out some earspace sharing agreement, but don't deny the guy the ability to play out loud ever.