During the last few weeks, I have rediscovered my love of blowing hours aimlessly playing the guitar. And in so doing, I had a thought about how simple technologies are going to create a super class of guitar maestros in the near future.
When I was in high school, I had to learn how to play songs the hard way. Playing songs on repeat while trying to work out the parts. Or I would shell out hard-earned cash for sheet music with tabs. Or most likely I would beg a friend to teach me. As a result, it was hard for me to build a growing repertoire of songs that were challenging but fun to play. However, in my most recent phase of music playing, whenever I hear a great song that I’d like to learn, I fire up YouTube and search for “how to play ______ on guitar” and I usually have a number of video tutorials to choose from. This has made it infinitely easier to learn licks and riffs that I never could figure out on my own. In the past four weeks, I have gotten better at guitar than I did in the past six years. That is exciting. That is disruptive. And that makes me excited to see what kids who grow up with this infinite supply of free lessons make of it.
Here’s one video that I recently watched while learning how to play Neil Young‘s “The Needle and the Damage Done.”
Needle and the Damage Done Tutorial
On July 14th, my girlfriend and I boarded a plane to Dublin, Ireland. One of her best friends, a lovely Irish girl named Emma, was getting married in Wexford, in the south of Ireland, on the 18th to a great guy named Garret. We planned to spend a few days in Dublin and then head down south for the ceremony and party.
I decided to use the trip as a little experiment in travel documentation. While my girlfriend would document our travels (okay, okay, our visits to Irish pubs) with her very nice digital camera, I would only bring along a Flip Video camera. She would take nice, well composed, well lit photos of people, places and things. I would capture short videos of action or moving panoramas of vistas that were too difficult to capture in one frame. I did my best to keep the videos short (under 20 seconds when possible). I also took certain videos for certain people based on jokes or stories we’ve shared.
Now that we’ve returned home, I’m uploading all of the videos to YouTube and she’s putting her photos up on Picassa. I plan on sending the respective links to our family and friends to see how people react and which medium they like better for vicariously experiencing our travels. Once I get feedback, I will post again here with the results along with sample photos and videos.
My suspicion is that as long as a particular person’s broadband connection and computer are fast enough they will get a kick out of the video and will really enjoy seeing us in action traveling. I think that this type of recording and sharing will become more common as the tools get better and people learn that videos that don’t tell stories but merely show something need to be very very very short. I know this is happening now. But perhaps one day, a majority of travelers will leave their still cameras at home.
