Don't Go It Alone - My New PRIVATE Community

Hello, everybody. I am live here, 10am on the dot. And I'm excited to see some of you in here in the chat already asking some great questions. Wanted to go live today to let you guys know because I know some of you might not be on my mailing list. And I've been sending out emails this week and I wanted to make sure everyone knew about this amazing new community that I have going now. This community has already kind of been going. It was mainly for students who had enrolled in some of my courses. And I decided that I wanted to open it up to other people because I know, you know, I get lots of questions here on YouTube and you know, I get emailed a lot of questions as well. And as you guys know, I try to respond to as many of these YouTube comments as possible. But, you know, as my channel gets bigger and I get more and more students across the world, it becomes harder and harder for me to dedicate time to answering every single question that I get via email or here on YouTube. I definitely try my best to answer as many as possible, but I wanted to focus my time on a community that was made just for my students. Good morning, dm. I see you. We got someone. Richard from New Hampshire, Tony Daniel. Richard's in the Fellowship of the Strings. So same with the community called the Fellowship of the Strings. I didn't name it. The students actually named it the students that are in there. And it's a really. It's a really great community. Let me shut my phone off so that we don't get any of those buzzes in here. And it's. I just love it because it's really like a family. We were talking about this last week we had our recitals. So I had students and they submitted videos and we watched everything. We live streamed it and they watched it live with me so that I could comment and congratulate them. Last year they surprised me. They went behind my back and surprised me. And this year we did it together so that I could be there and I could kind of clap along. And it was really great. Cause we got to live stream these recitals and we had lots of students who are watching live with us just cheering each other on. You're doing great job. Oh my God. You've come so far since last year. I love what you did on this song. Great song selection. It really is. It's a great little family of students. And many of them I've gotten to know very well. Some people I've met in person because they came to the live Events. For example, Richard. Who's in here? Richard da Silva. He's been to the live event. He's also in the community. And I get to know people, and it's great. I love seeing everyone's progress. And I was thinking of my goals for 2023. It's New Year's. Good morning, Scott. It's New Year's and I was thinking about my goals of what I want to do for my students in 2023. And I absolutely said my favorite part about being on YouTube and being online and being a teacher is helping students and being able to interact with students. I mean, I love recording the lessons. I love, you know, making, you know, the lessons and the courses. But what I really, really love is interacting with students and getting to know them better. So I want to spend the majority of my time in the community. This year, I'm still going to be making lessons here on YouTube. I'll be doing the song lessons, so don't worry about that. But I'm going to be in the community a lot. We're doing some cool things. We've got some challenges going. Monthly challenges now where we pick a song and we try and get students to play that song. Super motivating. Something to get you guys to practice. We're sharing our wins. What wins are we accomplishing from week to week, I also have been popping in and going live. There's a live interface in there, kind of like Facebook Live. And I've been going in there showing people behind the scenes. I'm in the process of. Of doing some remodeling in our sun porch. So I'm sharing some of the behind the scenes there, as well as I'll be sharing some behind the scenes shortly because I'm actually a little. I'll give you guys a little tidbit for 2023.

I'm actually redesigning the website. We're actually in the process of redesigning the website, making it much easier to navigate, find where the song lessons are, the videos. So we got some cool previews. And if you're in the fellowship of the strings, I'm going to show you guys some previews of what this website is going to look like or the ideas that we're putting together for the website. So not only am I doing bonus lessons PDFs, someone asked earlier, Lauren, will we get PDFs and tabs? There's certain things that I will release. So, for example, I know I had that movable spider exercise that I released also. There's some things I'm Working on, for example, I was working on a classical song and I tabbed it up for everyone. It was a finger picking song and I gave them the tab. So anyone who is interested in practicing could practice that. So there's definitely lots of extra bonus materials that are being posted in to the community. Will you ever offer an app? Well, Tony, you know, apps are interesting and difficult to develop. At some point maybe we will offer an app, but fortunately all the courses, my courses are hosted on a platform called Kajabi and Kajabi does have its own app that all my courses are hosted in. So I haven't really found a need. Even this community, this community is within its own app. So I haven't found a need to necessarily develop my own app yet. But that could be something that comes down the road. That's a great question. And something that, that has been on my mind as well. But this community does have its own app. Like I said, it has its own live room. So I go, I don't know if you guys know. So I go live like this every month. I do Q and A sessions in there. I do song circles. So basically I pick a bunch of songs and we work on playing those songs together. So like we'll pick a song like Leaving on a Jet Plane and I'll be like, all right guys, I'm going to play along and you guys are just going to try and keep up with me. Because everyone's like, oh, we wish we could play through an entire song, beginning to end. And then I have the recording. So if you ever miss a live Q and A and you asked a question. So basically we send out a form and if you have a question, you can submit your question. And then I get, you know, I actually have a printout here. This is a printout from an old Q and A. And I get everyone's questions and I go live and I answer the questions and then we make it available after the fact because I know with different time zones and stuff, for example, we're live, it's 10:00am right now, but it might be 1:00 clock in the morning somewhere else in the world where one of my students is. So, so we want to make sure that you guys have access to all of those recordings. But the best part of the community that I want to emphasize is the family aspect of it. And a lot of the students, they're, they're happy that they're not doing this by themselves. Learning the guitar, especially online, it can be very, very lonely. I did it myself. I was self taught for 10 years. I did the go it yourself journey for a long time. And it is lonely because you know, you have questions and you're not sure if you're doing something right or am I the only person that's having trouble with the D chord? All these F bar chords. I want to throw my guitar out the window. And then you go and post that in the community and other people like, well, this is what I found that helped me. I can chime in on unhelpful tips and other people saying, you know what? That's exactly where I was a year ago. Keep going, it gets better. So just having that support is, is so helpful, especially you know, because that's the hardest part of the first three months. The three months is the hardest part of learning guitar because you're learning all these new mechanics and technique and it's, it's not easy. It's a new, it's a new process for your muscles. So you know, you can start questioning, you start planting those seeds of doubt, being like, maybe, maybe this isn't for me, maybe this is too hard. And then you have other people are like, no, keep going. Like you've got this. And just having that support, not just for me, but from other students is, is super helpful. So I have a question here. Richard said is vibly now. Is now dead now that absorbed into Kajabi. Yeah. So Bibley was the community. Great question. So it was a company that was acquired by Kajabi, the place where I hold my courses. And as far as I know they are rebranding it Richard so that it's not really going to be Vibely anymore. I think it's called Communities 2.0. It's Kajabi Communities 2.0. It's their new community platform. So it's not going to be, it's not going to be its own separate thing. Thing hopefully come January. So. Hi, Ed from Florida and I have Ulrich. Very cool. And I try to fall all the way from South Africa. So see, I have students all over the world and, and it's amazing that we get to connect. I got a lot of students Canada. I saw someone was in here from Ontario. I see Francis from Ireland in here. You know, I have students all over Southern California. I see Laura here, Greece, you know, everywhere. North Carolina. You guys are awesome. And this is a great way for us to connect and come together. I've even had students recently, some students who they found out they lived really close together and they got together in a small group and we're playing songs. So the community is not just about me. I mean, I know you guys want to hang out with me too. But ultimately the community becomes about the friendships you make on this guitar journey. And there's many people, some of them who are in this chat, who've met other students in person. And it is, it becomes a family, it becomes an extension of who you are. You get to make some new friends, you know, and especially as you get older, it can sometimes be harder to get out and meet new people. And it's a great way to meet a lot of wonderful like minded individuals. So I did pin a link to the top of the chat there if you guys want to go check it out. We're doing open enrollment now through January 15th, but if you sign up before January 1st, I am offering a founders discount. So you can use the coupon code founders and you'll save 22% I think on the, on the one year membership. So it's, it's a great deal. I'm only offering it through January 1st and then it's going to go to its regular pricing. There's a monthly option and a yearly option. I'm offering the discount on the, the yearly. But the, the monthly price at $19 a month is, is definitely well worth it. I wish I had mentorship like that at a, at a cheap price like that. You know, for me when you, I used to teach in order to take lessons. For me, I forget I used to do 45 minute lessons and it was like, I think it was like $300 a month or three something to take lessons with me for 45 minutes once a week. So it wasn't, it wasn't cheap. So the ability to, to get access to a good teacher, to get access to other students who are on the same path as you and to get access to all the bonus materials, bonus lessons. So I go in there anytime there's a YouTube song lesson that's posted, I go in there, I post the link to the video as well as a link to any other additional notes like strumming patterns, the chords. This way you guys have some lesson notes that you can jot down for these lessons. So there's lots of cool stuff on there that you guys can have in addition to what's on YouTube. You don't need to have one of my courses. Students ask me all the time, Lauren, do I have to have one of your courses to be part of this? No, because we're all, you know, I know there's some students, they reach out to me all the time. Lauren, I'm not a beginner anymore. I know the core is like, I know my strumming, but, like, be cool to, like, do some Q and A and some other stuff. So it's a great opportunity for you guys to hop in without necessarily having to buy, you know, a $200 course or if you buy a platinum membership, you know, buying a $600 course platform, you guys can get in there very easily for. For $19 a month. Rick asks, I've been playing for a while, but I can't seem to build up my speed when playing the A minor pentatonic scale. Any suggestions? Well, guess what? I have a guitar right here. Great question.

Let me just reach for a pick. Okay, so, great question. A minor pentatonic, anything in regards to speed, whether it's chord changes, whether it's scales, whether it's finger picking exercises, anything. It all comes down to relaxation. So we have an A minor pentatonic scale. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's just a five note scale. And we would start here on this. A note. Okay, we're going to do what's called position one. It's the most common pattern learned by most beginners. And we're going to play 5, 8, 5, 5, 7. 5, 7. 5, 7, 5, 8, 5, 8. Those are the frets. Okay. 5, 8, 5, 7. 5, seven, five, seven, five, eight, five, eight. Now, what I would recommend doing, you know, I teach in the seven level system. I have a bunch of spider exercises that you can work on. And the best spider exercise would be to take these fingers. All right, we're going 5, 6, 7, 8. Okay, so we get some extra fingers that we're not using in the pentatonic, but we're kind of playing that pentatonic position cross chromatically, meaning we're playing every note as opposed to just playing two notes per string. Now, what you want to do is you want to start by going slow. Anything you're working on, go slow. And before you play the next note, breathe out. Make sure you relax the finger before you play the next note. Because if you feel tension, like I'm tensing my. You can see it in here, I'm tensing. If you don't relax. See, that's relaxed. Now it's tense, okay? So if your fingers are tense, you're going to have to force the finger down as opposed to relax it down. So as you're playing through this, play a note, take a deep breath in, deep breath out. Relax. Play the next note.

Okay. If you want to work on speed and you're like, lauren, that's not speed. That's going slower. Speed comes from relaxation. I use the boxing analogy a lot. I was a boxer. I don't know if some of you saw I got a speed speed bag. Maybe I'll make a video for you guys in the community. I. I used to box, and I love speed bag. Now, the thing with boxing, in anything, you know, if you want to punch fast, if you force the fist out, if you force this, this hand out, it's going to go slow. But if you just whip your hand out, it'll go fast. Same thing with strumming. How do you get fast at strumming? You've got to relax the hand. If your stumming is stiff, it's going to sound like this.

You know, you get harsh and you're like, oh, my strumming sounds horrible. Why does yours sound so good? It's because my hand is relaxed. And when you relax your hand, you can start doing 16th notes drumming, you know.

And you can start playing things much faster. So speed essentially comes from relaxation. And as soon as you can relax, then I would get on a metronome.

And start working your exercises in a relaxed state. So that's my. That's my tips for relaxation on using a metronome. Scales, chords, anything that you're trying to build speed. First. Work on the relaxation. Then put it to a metronome and push yourself. Hi, Lauren, could you discuss muting electric guitar strings getting ringing when playing my strap? Thanks. Yeah, Kevin, I got the acoustic here, but it's the same concept. You can hear that on the acoustic. Like so say. I don't know if you guys. If the microphone's going to pick it up, but say I go back to that. A minor pentatonic scale. I was just playing, and I don't mute the strings.

Hear that? I don't know if you guys can hear that. The strings are ringing. There's. There's string noise that's coming through. And if you're playing through an amp with distortion, that. That's going to amplify. An amp amplifies sound, so it's going to amplify that string noise. So the way. There's a few different ways to do it, the way I was taught to do it is to use the thumb on my picking hand to mute the strings. Let me scooch over a little bit. So you can see here the microphone's in the way. I'm kind of Touching the strings.

So you can. You can hear. These strings are dead because I essentially have part of my thumb resting on those strings.

And as I'm working my way up the strings, strings, I'm muting the other strings with my other fingers on my fretting hand. So it's kind of a combination of finessing the strings with your picking and your fretting hand. I know some people who just use their fretting hand. This is like a double protection. So on the way down, I kind of mute with the thumb, and on the way back up, I mute with the other hands. And it's just essentially ensuring that. That when you're playing other notes.

So instead of getting that bleed and you just have to work on it very, very slowly. The thumb thing for me took me about a year to really get down pat. I think fretting on the strings is a little bit easier. But as you're moving, it's almost like you're playing a bar chord without any of the tension. And as you're working down the strings, you're just moving more. I feel like it's this first finger. You're kind of moving this first finger up and down the strings to do muting. But it's a little bit of comb of both hands. It really depends on what I'm doing. So play around with that, and that might help you with getting that string noise to come down. And what you want to do is, as you're playing through a scale or something, check the strings if you're doing it. If you do this and you hear strings coming through, you're not muting the strings. So as you're playing, just pause wherever you are and make sure the strings that are supposed to be muted aren't. Aren't sounding or coming through. So. Good morning, Joe. Nice to see you here. Hi, Lauren. Is there a bypass for all bar chords? I'm practicing them and we'll do it, but just want to know. I don't know what you mean by bypass. I think you're asking if. If there's an easier way to do bar chords. So my recommendation, I go over this in my power and bar chord course. My recommendation is to first use. Learn power chords.

Whether you do it with two fingers or three fingers one, because it gets your hands starting to be comfortable for bar chords. So, for example, if I make a G5 power chord and I play it with my first, third and pinky, what does that look like? It looks like a G minor power chord. I'm just not pressing the other strings I'm muting with my bar finger. Okay, there's that muting again. I'm muting the bottom strings with my first finger. But the top half, if you. If I didn't strum, you would probably think I was playing a G minor power chord. So part of it is just getting comfortable with the shape. The other thing is strength. There is a strength component to bar chords. All right. This first finger has to plot. It's like a capo has to. Applying enough pressure to get all of these strings to ring. And the best way to do that is to start in the middle of the guitar.

As if I play a horrible bar chord.

And move it down.

Down the prep.

So the F chord is the hardest to play because of the tension here on. On this nut. So if you get more in the middle of the guitar, start there and work your way down the guitar. That would be my biggest recommendation. The other thing is to just do chord push ups or even just first finger push ups. Work on getting. You can see I'm probably pulsing my finger. You gotta practice getting enough pressure. And usually when people have problem, it's usually the bottom two strings. Those are usually. That's usually the point where people have a lot of trouble with bar chords. So it's just making sure you get enough squeeze on this bottom part of your finger there. I want to play Stairway to Heaven, but finding it impossible. Stairway to Heaven is not an easy song. Let me see if I can remember off the top of my head.

Right? Something like that. I can't remember off the top of my head right now, but it's a lot. There's a lot of finger picking in this. And there's a lot of bar chord. There's a lot of different parts. There's multiple guitar parts. The guitar solo itself, I've learned the guitar solo, that itself is its own study. So what I do when I. When I used to teach people Stairway to Heaven in my private studio, what I always do is take it section at a time. So let's learn the acoustic guitar stuff. All right, let's learn that intro. You know, I can't. Wish you can remember the chords.

There is.

Something like that and then there's. There's other parts. So we would learn the intro, because if you learn that intro, then you can kind of learn the first part of the verses because that, that picking goes over the top. Then we would take, hey, let's learn the chord, the strumming parts.

Then we would start learning the strumming parts. And Then of course you have the solo section.

So you have all the. These strumming sections. And then of course there's the Sol Young.

Something like that. Doing this off the top of my head, I haven't played that song in a while. So there is. You can literally study that song for a year. There's so many parts, there's so many techniques. That's all a minor pentatonic. So if you wanted. Even if you went really slow playing that guitar solo up to speed. Speed. It's very fast, so you'd have to play it slow. But it's all a minor pentatonic work. With the exception of every once in a while there's an F tone that comes in that's not part of the pentatonic. It's. It's an added tone, but it's all a minor pentatonic work. So that's a great solo. There's a lot of great licks, bends, lots of cool stuff in that. If you wanted a minor pentatonic study. But for that song, it's literally learning it. It's just like any song, you got to learn it in sections. Intro first. If you're not good at finger picking, you gotta start at the basics. You gotta learn how to finger pick. Okay. That is. That's the big part. If you can't do any type of finger picking, jumping in a Stairway to Heaven is gonna be. Be tricky. So I would recommend learning simple arpeggios first.

Take those arpeggios. They do pop into Stairway, but there's a lot of other stuff that. That's going on. So those would be my recommendations on breaking down a song. And what do you do when you go and you learn it? That's what I do when I learn songs. I break it up into. Into sections and into pieces. Let's see. Jersey says morning learn. I've been playing for two years now, but I have to deal with carpal tunnel. Yeah, I've had that before. Nerve damage in my arms and hands. I can play some simple three, three chord strings and strumming is hard, but I play. Yeah. Whenever you have something like that. I have a lot of students. I focus working primarily with students who are over the age of 50. When you start getting into your 60s and 70s, you start getting some arthritis, right? My dad has arthritis, my mom has arthritis. So it's something that starts coming into your joints as you get older. So sometimes you have to simplify chords. That's why I teach those two finger chords. But there's also there's triads.

There's chord triads and inversions that you can use. You could play the guitar just using these bottom three strings or just the top three strings. Power chords, three string chords, especially, you know, for those who have arthritis, it's sometimes hard to do the power chord as a bar like this. That's why I teach you using the third and fourth fingers, because for some people with arthritis, it's easier to use the two individual fingers versus just the third finger. They might not be able to press hard enough. I've had students, you know, because of their arthritis, we could never really get them to play full barre chords. So we would play partial chords. We would either play the top half of the bar or we would just play the bottom half of the bar. Okay. Depending on what we do. There's always a way to make it work. There's people without hands that play guitar. So, you know, if there's a will, there's a way you can do it. And, you know, again, going back to the membership that I was talking about earlier, for those of you that are jumping in, these are things that I do within the community sometimes is that someone will ask a question and I'll go live and kind of in depth go over like, hey, this would be my suggestion. If you're learning Stairway to Heaven, this would be my suggestion for it. I remember one time someone was having trouble with shuffle rhythms, and I was like, all right, I'm just gonna go live and do something on. On shuffle rhythms for a few minutes for people who might be diving into that and need a little bit of extra help. So I love popping in live and just doing, like, quick little three, four, five minute lessons just to be like, hey, here's just a quick tip. If you're working on strumming and it's not sounding good, here's some tips. Or if you're, you know, I just released this song on YouTube and here's another special little trick or preview. Like, I have the Indigo Girls coming out this Saturday, and I went live in the group and I said, here's this song. And I said, now for those of you who are a little bit more intermediate, I want you to try before my lesson comes out, I want you to try and figure out what the strumming pattern is on your own. I'm going to teach you what the strumming pattern is on the. On your lesson, when the lesson comes out on YouTube. But I want you to try and start using your ear and see if you can develop a way to hear what's going to happen before the lesson. And then when the lesson comes out, you can listen to what I'm doing, see the strumming pattern and see if you got it right. So lots of cool stuff that we're doing in the community. I'm going to start doing a lot more of this. For those of you who hopped on late. Most of my time is going to be spent in the community. I'm still going to be here on YouTube, obviously, because I love being here and helping you guys and reaching out to people all over the world. But if you're interested in becoming part of my private community where I'm going to spend a lot of my time, interact with other students, get your questions answered, go live like this with me once or twice a month, then definitely check it out. It's laurenbatemanguitar.com backslash Fellowship I put a link. I posted a link that some pinned to the top of the chat. There's also links in the description below. We do have a special founders rate going on because this is my first time opening this up to the public. So we're doing a founders rate right now. So if you go there and you use the coupon code founder, you will save I think it's like 22% off a year membership after January 1st. It's going up to the full price. So definitely want you guys to take advantage of that now if you can. So definitely go check that out. Laurenbatementguitar.com backslash Fellowship get you some details there that you guys can learn about all the cool stuff that we do. I have a hard time getting my thumb over and I'm supposed to be fretting with it or just muting the sixth string. So I dropped my pick. Let me pick that up. That's a little bit more My classical guitar teacher would yell at me all the time for doing that and my current classical guitar teacher yelling at me too. I use the thumb just to mute, but I have enough stretch in my hand to do this that it's still comfortable for a lot of people. When you're just getting started, that's not comfortable. So you may need to mute that top string with your third finger here. I like muting when I play a C chord or an A minor chord or even a D chord. I like to mute this top string with my thumb. Classical guitar teachers will yell at you that that's bad form, bad technique. I've been doing it for decades. It's not going to change.

But it's Just for me, that's just very comfortable. For some people it's not comfortable and you may want to try muting different ways. But for me it's very comfortable. Say I was going to play a song like what's Eric Clapton's did you know my name?

How come I cannot remember if I saw you in heaven? Is that, is that the name of the song? Whatever that song is, I can't remember the name for some reason. I would play a lot of that because it's. I can't remember it off the top of my heads. But it's a lot of. There's a lot of bass notes on this top string and I. Tears in Heaven. Thank you so much, Anne. That's Tears in Heaven.

So that song. I tend to use my thumb a lot to play the bass notes depending on what the chord inversion is and what we're playing. So that's the song that I would. Thank you everyone. Tears in Heaven. Appreciate that. So sometimes I use it to play bass notes too. Like if I play a D slash F sharp.

I like grabbing it with my thumb versus having to do this shape or you know, a bass, you know one like, like Landslide. Because it's a finger picking thing. I don't play it that way like because I'm only playing the bottom. So we go A minor. Oh, it's here. Sorry. So when you go from A minor.

Because I don't have to worry about this high E string.

I play it that way. So it really depends on what I'm doing, where I'm going, what chords I'm coming in and out of, as to when I would use that thumb to play bass notes. But I mostly use it to mute and a lot of people do. I also like the thumb up here. Electric guitar.

It helps with me. I feel like I can get better leverage on bends when I have my thumb up there versus just. I mean, could I do it with the. Yeah, I probably could. Probably could. But I just got in the habit. That was how I was taught to do it. So that's my habit. I don't know if it's a good habit or a bad habit, but that is my habit of doing bends. So there you go.

Your pinned link isn't working because guitar is spelled wrong. Well, you know what? Thank you so much. I'm going to unpin that. Give me two seconds to type it back in and I will, I will pin it again. You know spelling, you guys know spelling is not my strong point. If you guys have ever seen my emails or Any of my, you know, if you're in the community, you guys know we call it Laurenese. So. Lauren baymanguitar.com backslash fellowship and make sure I spelled it right. Lauren B guitar.com fellowship gonna pin it again. Thank you. We call it Laurenese or at least that's what my students have fondly named it. They've called it Lauren E.

So it's just I'm hard, especially on a phone. I, I've got three thumbs on a phone. I always mistype and I just don't have a. I never have time to go back and improve read. So please click on that link, let me know if it works. I'd appreciate it. Patrick. Hello, 70 year old beginner. No basic chords, but what strumming patterns should I learn in practice? My strumming is terrible. I would recommend if your strumming's terrible, Patrick, I would definitely go check out my free crash course. Make sure you get the foundation of rhythm. It's great to play fancy strumming patterns. It's nice to be, you know, you guys hurt me. You know.

It's cool to do stuff like that, but if you can't get timing, if you can't just go 1, 2, 3, 4 in time, there's no point in progressing past that point. So my recommendation, go pick up my free crash course laurenbateman.com backslash crash course laurenbatement.com crashcourse and I have a free crash course which I show where I show you some simple strumming patterns. And then obviously in the seven level guitar system, my beginner course, I. There's a lot of strumming patterns in that course. I want to say there's maybe 30 to 40 different strumming patterns in that course, maybe more. And I do 44 time. I do waltz patterns. We do a lot of 8th note strumming patterns as well as syncopated rhythms. Syncopated rhythms are rhythms where you don't always have a down strum on the downbeat. Those are kind of like late beginner to early intermediate strumming things. But I would highly recommend, if you feel like you're not, you don't have the greatest timing and you need to work on that. Definitely go check out the seven level guitar system. Lauren bateman.lauren bateman guitar.com Course I should, I should make special links for all these so I don't have to keep saying my name. But the seven level guitar system is really where all the foundational items are. So I would highly recommend if, if You're a beginner and you're struggling with things like chords, strumming, picking seven level guitar system. Seven level guitar system. I will probably. Any question that's in this chat is probably answered within that course. Or I would say at least 90% of the questions I've already answered here are answered within that course. And they usually have an exercise that goes along with them. The PDFs, the tabs, all that stuff. Lauren, you don't play your tailor very often. I want you to sell it to me.

You know, I. Let me tell you a story because I know you guys like stories. So this is my crafter. I bought this, I'm gonna say maybe about 10 years ago and there's a lot of history that goes with this guitar. I've recorded. So I have three albums. I recorded two of them with this guitar, one with my purple Ibanez that's over there. And I've done a lot of my live performances with this guitar as well. It's just. I'm very comfortable with it. I love it. I. It's the same size as my tailor, so they're both the om size guitar with the cutaway. So in terms of size and scale, they're. They're about the same. So I, I just, I just really like this crafter. She's my baby. We've been through a lot together. A lot of tears and emotion have gone into this guitar. I really like the sound of the Taylor more for finger picking. I think the Taylor is a much better sounding finger picking guitar. But I like the bite and edginess of this guitar for strumming. And I do do a lot of strumming stuff, but I just always. The crafter is always right here. The tailor is in a bag somewhere. I take it to my lessons. I play it when I go to do my lessons. But the crafter is my baby. I will never get rid of this guitar. It'll probably always be my favorite guitar. The Taylor might play a little easier than this, but it's not too much of a difference that I would, I would give up on this guitar. So do I have a favorite guitar? Yeah, it's this one. I do have a favorite. It's this one right here. I do like my electric. My Ibanez. Let me pull it off the wall real quick for you guys. So, I mean, I have the Gretch. You guys always see the Gretch. The Gretch is not the easiest to play though. Even though it's one of my most expensive guitars. I Don't play it very often.

It's got a great sound for like blues and blues guitar. But this bridge, it's a floating bridge. So if you it. It's very easy to go out of tune and lose the intonation on that guitar versus this. I have more of a. This bridge is fixed so like I could try and rip these off and it's not going to move. But I love this Ibanez. You can see how thin it is. So I don't like very heavy guitars. Partly why I like playing acoustic. And. And this is, this is chambered, I believe, inside, so it's much lighter. But this is a very narrow Ibanez. I've had this one for many moons too, at least 10 years. And I love this guitar. Humbuckers down here, it's all stock. I haven't traded out any of the, the pickups or anything. It's never gotten into doing any of that stuff. But this is my favorite electric is my Ibanez. I just, I love the feel of it. It plays. Plays very well. I think I spent like $600 on it maybe 12 or 13 years ago. This is older. I have this before the Crafter, but that's my favorite. This is my favorite electric to play. I love the way it feels, I love the way it sounds. And then my Crafter is still my favorite acoustic. But like I said, the tailor is very nice for finger picking applications. It has a very, very warm sound to it. And if I went into a recording studio and had to finger pick, I would probably use the tailor. I probably use the tailor. If I had to strum, I'd probably stick with the, the Crafter because it's got a little bit more bite to it, a little bit more brightness, but other than that, yeah, I love this. I love this crafter. Great question, great question. So you're saying I shouldn't have made a Graduate my first guitar? No, they. They're all different. This one is a. This one's a George Harrison replica. Not all the gretches. Like, even if you. So this is like the duo jet model. I think. Even if you bought a modern duo jet, I think it's a fixed bridge. I don't think it's a floating bridge. So no, I, I love Gretsch. I think Gretch makes beautiful guitars. I almost bought another one. I was gonna get a hollow bodied electric and I almost bought a Gretch, but I bought the Taylor instead. Only because I play acoustic more than I do electric. But no, if you bought a Gretch. They're beautiful guitars and most of them do have fixed bridges. This one just happens to be a floating bridge and it's easy to whack it out of, out of tune and intonation at times. So. Yeah, so. Yeah, I already answered that. Thank you. Yes, I. I love the Ibanez as well. I have a warm feelings towards Ibanez. My first guitar ever was an Ibanez. I think my first three guitars were Ibanez guitars. My first guitar is an Ibanez. Then my second acoustic. The first guitar that I bought for myself was a purple Ibanez. And then the third guitar was that electric that I just showed you. That was the third guitar I bought was. Was the red. I love the tiger pattern because my purple guitar was a purple tiger and this one was a red tiger pattern. So. See, I bought, I bought the guitars because I like the color.

That. That's how I bought guitars in the beginning. I'm like, I really like the color Crafter. I mean, she sounded beautiful too, but I don't typically like playing guitars. Even with Taylor, I don't. I. I would. Even if it was the most beautiful sounding guitar in the world, I would probably never buy just a Plain Jane front guitar. So I love the Crafter because it had this inlay with the hummingbird and up here. So I thought that was cool and I thought that was different. So that's why I ended up buying the Crafter. So I buy, not necessarily off the sound. It's more the looks. I want a guitar where people are going to go, wow, that's a. That's a nice looking guitar. Or that's a cool looking guitar. So I want to be as good as Joe Bonamasa. Yeah. So. Well, let me go back. Speaking of Joe Bonamassa, we have a new blues course coming out. Next level, Pentatonix. I brought on a new teacher that I'm working with. His name is Charlie Long and he's a good friend of mine. I know Charlie for, for very many years. And he's actually going to be at the live event this summer. We're doing a live event here in September, Wooburn, Mass. And he's going to be at that event and he's also going to be live in the community. So Charlie Long is our new resident electric guitar player. You know, I play electric. I know for those of you, you know, who were with me over Covid, you saw me, you know, doing Stairway, doing some Carpenter stuff and other things that I was learning over Covid. But he's really like the electric guitar guru. And he's big into blues, jazz, and rock. So he's going to be coming in and assisting me and creating a lot more courses oriented around electric guitar, Especially beyond the beginner level. Like, I can do it. I'm really good at the beginner level stuff. All right. And I can do intermediate and I can do some advanced stuff. But when it comes to scales and playing solos, it's really not my strong suit. Okay. There's lots of guitar players out there who can play an electric guitar way better than me solo, way better than me. So, you know, I said, why don't I bring in someone that I know who's going to treat my students the way I would treat them and teaches very similar to the way that I teach in a very step by step approach. Makes people feel good about themselves, makes people believe, hey, you can do this. Just gonna take a little bit of practice, but you got this. So Charlie, he. So not only when you join the community, not only are you going to get me live, but Charlie's going to be going live. And he's going to be focusing more on electric guitar, blues, scales. He's going to be focusing more on that stuff. And I'm going to stay focusing on the acoustic guitar, the finger picking, the strumming, all that stuff. The singer songwriter type stuff. That's going to be me. And Charlie's going to be focusing a lot on rock and blues because I've had so many students say, lauren, can you make more electric guitar oriented and stuff? And, and when I did my blues guitar course, I used the Gretsch and the Ibanez. So I, I that entire course, I think for maybe two or three videos, I intentionally did it on electric guitar. So people are like, lauren, you can play electric guitar. Yes, I can. But other than that, I'm mostly going to be focusing on the acoustic guitar. Charlie's going to be going live. He's going to be doing Q&As around guitar, scales, rock guitar, power chords, blues guitar. So any of your questions around that? We now have a resident expert who is going to be in there answering those questions. He's got his own little corner in the community. It's called Charlie's corner. And you can go in there and you can ask Charlie any questions about electric guitar blues. He's in there popping in, answering people's questions as well as myself. All right. Like I said, I'm going to focus on answering. If you're in my seven level guitar course, there's a topic in there called seven level Guitar Questions. Any questions you have about that course, I'm going to be in there answering. Some of my other students who've been with me for years might be in there chiming in as well. That's what I love about this community, is that is everyone is so helpful. I was reading something last night, someone asked a question, and I think they got like 15 responses. And his. Or not even his response, another student was like, wow, there's so many responses here. Everyone is so helpful. And. And that's part of the experience. And that's the type of community that we've created is where people want to be helpful, motivating, supporting. They want you to be successful. I want you to be successful. I really care about my students. Everyone says, like, Lauren, what makes you different from all these other guitar teachers, you know, on YouTube? And they're all great, you know, I don't know any of them personally, but they all seem like nice people. You know, you get Justin, you got Andy, you got Marty, you got Rick Beato, who, you know, plays a scale up and down in five seconds and doesn't tell you what he's doing. I love Rick. He's. He's. Rick Miato is like, way over my head. He's for the really, really advanced, like music theory gurus. I think he does a lot of cool stuff, but I'll watch stuff on Instagram. And my wife's like, he didn't. What did he do? And I'm like, that was like his quick lesson. He just shows you, gives you a little idea. He plants a seed and lets you run with it. She's like, I have no clue what he did. And I'm like, me neither. But. But it's. What he's doing is so cool. But back to what makes me a little bit different than. Than some of these other guys who are, who are pretty advanced guitar players is my students always say it's because you're so accessible. The fact that you do this, you go live, you answer our questions, you respond to emails when you can, you are available. I think that's one of the biggest comments I get from people, is that you are available. And that's why, again, I wanted to create this community and open it up to more people to be like, hey, that's what I want. I want to be available to people who want the extra help. All right? It's. It's one thing to be here on YouTube and learn things for free. And, you know, if you're one of those people that. That's all you can do, then you know what? That's all you can do. Okay, I see there's. There. There's people from all over the world here. And, you know, the US Dollar is a lot of money for someone who might be coming from the Philippines, and they might not be able to afford the course, but they've got the free stuff on YouTube, and you can go as far as you can with that. And I know from my personal experience of learning on my own for 10 years, there's only so far you can go with free. Okay. At some point, it helps to get a mentor. It helps to get a coach who's going to help you push you to get out of your comfort zone and go to the next level. All right? And that's where I have the courses. So for anyone who wanted to, one, support the channel. Because I get. People ask me all the time, lauren, how do I support the channel? Like, hey, you know, go buy a course. You know, go make a donation. And now this is a great way to support the channel. If you guys love what I'm doing here on YouTube, you can go and support the channel by becoming a part of this membership and making basically a monthly contribution to what I'm doing here. But not only that, you get access to me in the community. You get access to the other students, and you get access to this family of people that we've created who are so supportive. We don't allow. There's no negativity, and I don't allow any negativity in the community. I'm like, guys, keep it positive, all right? If you. If you don't have something nice to say, keep your mouth shut, all right? Like my mom said, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it at all, all right? Be supportive. We want to be positive. There's a lot of guitar communities out there where people, like, are making fun of people for not being good and. And making people feel like crap. Like, Ultimate Guitar is probably one of the worst communities out there. People are horrible in terms of Internet trolls, even on YouTube. I get a lot of crap on YouTube from people who are like, you suck. And I'm like, well, you know, that's fine. I'm glad you. I'm glad you feel that way. But in my community, that's not allowed. All right? It's positivity only. It's support, all right? Constructive criticism is a good thing. Like, I remember one time I had a student and I Knew I could do this because the student had been with me a while. This is. I don't know if Kelly's on here. Her name is Kelly. And she wrote a song, and she posted a video of the song. And I listened to it, and I said, kelly, this is really great. But I said, about. Maybe about 45 or 50 seconds into the song, I said, right at this point, I said, I start to get bored. I want something different to happen here. I said, either in the guitar playing or in your vocals. I. I said, you did a great job for, like, your first song. I said, but I'm going to challenge you at this point to do something dynamically different. And I saw her at the live event, and we talked about that moment, and she was like, you know what she's like. In the beginning, she was like. I was a little. I don't want to say taken aback, but, you know, she was like, oh, it wasn't just like, great job, pat on the back. She's like. But then I realized what you had done and realized that that's what I needed. So I knew I could do that with her because I knew her well enough. But I was encouraging her, saying, this is good. I know you can do better, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna encourage you to go out of your comfort zone. And she ended up rewriting it and making it better. So. So she said, thank you so much for encouraging me and giving that. That, you know, that constructive criticism of being like, you know, I think this would be better if you did this here. And since it was coming from me, from a songwriting perspective, she really, really appreciated that. What do you think about a Santana acoustic guitar in terms of doing a song? Santana is a. Is a great player. Black Magic Woman is only, like, two chords. I think it's maybe A minor and D minor 7. It's two chords. That's a great song to actually learned that first on piano when I was taking piano lessons, but Santana's got a lot of great stuff. I haven't personally learned a lot of his music myself, but I could look and see if there's a good acoustic one out there. Or maybe that's something Charlie's gonna pick up on his channel so that you guys can explore with some of that stuff over there. So. Yes. Fleetwood. Fleetwood Mac. Oh, it was originally a Fleetwood Mac song. I did not know that. Well, I'm gonna be doing more Fleetwood Mac stuff, too. I realized I haven't done much of their stuff, and they've got a lot of great acoustic guitar stuff. I did go your own way last week, so we'll be doing more Fleetwood Mac. I'm. I'm planning out 2023 for you guys right now, so I'm gonna hop off. Thank you so much. Make sure go check out that Fellowship of the strings. Laurenbatementguitar.com backslash Fellowship. I pinned the link there, and hopefully it's working correctly now. I'll see you guys very soon. And new lesson coming out on Saturday. Indigo Girls. Lots of cool strumming. I hope you guys check it out. I'll see you all very, very soon. Thank you so much for being here. Bye.