Courtney B. answered • 06/22/24
Music and Academic Tutoring
Watching videos or listening to recordings to learn an instrument goes back as far as some form of recording sound has existed. It is not even remotely unique to YouTube or the digital age. Even before that, people would buy music books and attempt to learn from them, without taking lessons, or they would simply tinker on their own or maybe with a little advice from another tinkerer in their community until they sort of figured something out.
The result was that they ended up using an instrument to make different sounds than what were already being made. That practice created entire genres of music, distinct from what others were already doing. Bluegrass is one example. Every instrument had to have a first player, and every musical genre had to have a beginning. So at some point, someone learned by tinkering rather than by taking lessons, and that has value historically and musically that should not be ignored.
The problem is, most people who want to learn from recordings instead of a teacher aren't looking to create a new musical genre due to lack of access to formal education and a distinct cultural difference compared to those who typically seek formal education. Most people who want to learn from recordings want to be able to replicate what they are seeing or hearing in the recordings, and when those aren't the results they get - because there is so much a video cannot show you or neglects to discuss - they move on to a different video, assuming they do not give up. This causes a lot of input of information but not a lot of processing of that information. It also causes a lot of frustration.
Furthermore, you have to know how to practice in order to make significant progress on your own, and that is something you learn from other musicians by interacting with them and making music with them and discussing what works and doesn't work for them until you find the approach that works for you, not by sitting alone on your bed with your phone and your instrument. Learning in isolation is the wrong type of experience for a discipline that is meant to be a shared experience.
YouTube music "tutorials" are very poorly organized.
YouTube offers playlists that YouTube music "teachers" could in theory use to provide better organization, but in my experience, they are not utilized in a manner that would actually be useful for a serious student who wants to move from one video to the next in a sequence in order to learn the instrument with no prior experience.
Also, such tutorials tend to be topic-oriented instead of providing step-by-step instructions. You don't know what order the topics should best be arranged in, so you end up trying to tackle something without having the foundation to do so.
Apart from that, you could very easily be doing something incorrectly for an extended period of time, cementing a bad habit that will eventually make it impossible to do something you want to do, and there would be no one who could help you identify and correct that issue because you lack any sort of feedback on your progress.
A lot of people who try to learn on YouTube quickly discover that they cannot, but they are either too stubborn to admit it or else they cannot afford another option. Therefore, they try to get free lessons by posting their videos online for feedback. The problem with this approach is that you will always find someone who tells you what you want to hear and you will also always find someone who will be unnecessarily critical. Neither extreme is particularly helpful if you actually want to learn.
The best, most efficient, most effective way to learn to play an instrument is going to be to find someone who does what you want to do and ask them to show you how to do it. They will often want you to pay them for their time. That's what a lesson is. In between lessons, you need to practice or else you will not be ready to learn new things in the next lesson.
The second-best option is to learn in a group of people helping each other with the more experienced players facilitating, and we see that a lot more often with string instruments than with piano. Such a group is often called a session.
The third-best option is independent study with feedback from a trusted source but no regularly scheduled lessons. Some teachers call these video exchange lessons, and they still charge for them, but not as frequently and perhaps not as much as more traditional lessons.
YouTube is so far down the list of effective ways to learn that I really cannot recommend it except in cases where someone already plays at a relatively advanced level and simply wants to learn a new technique. For example, many established violinists learn the "chop" and other modern bowing techniques this way rather than learning it in violin lessons, which tend to be more classically oriented.
