Because I’m that kind of nerd, back in the day (the days in question being the ’90s), I would spend an inordinate amount of time both hunting down back issues of American and British guitar magazines and waiting for new issues of same to come out, mostly hoping for coverage of or better, song transcription of something alternative-nation or Britpop-approved. I still have many of those issues, dog-eared and falling apart, that taught me to badly play a lot of those tunes. I also spent a lot of my university printer allocation printing out tabs from newsgroups that were almost certainly wrong and the characters of which never lined up correctly anyways (is this a chord or individual notes? I’ll never know).
Point being, given this it’s a surprise it took me so long do delve into the world of YouTube guitar tutorials. Part of it is I don’t necessarily have the patience to sit and watch someone talk at me rather than just scan a page with the eyeballs. Or maybe I just didn’t find a channel that spoke to me… at least until discovering anyonecanplayguitar.co.uk.
Run by Adrian Woodward1 out of London, ACG is a website, a YouTube channel, and a Patreon account and across them he posts a weekly lesson that covers a range of genres, but largely focuses on post-punk, shoegaze, and indie. Get a sense of why I like it?
Past lessons have covered tracks by Wire, The Cure, Ride, Slint (who knew I wanted to know how to play “Nosferatu Man”?), Joy Division, PJ Harvey, Bauhaus, XTC… There’s been plenty of John McGeoch2 content with tutorials on both Magazine and Siouxsie songs – lots of Siouxsie songs – and his teaching me to play The Chameleons’ “Swamp Thing” is what has earned him my Patreon dollars in perpetuity. And yes, he has covered his website’s namesake. Even on their best days you never got this stuff from Guitar World.
The Patreon is name-your-price and gets you access to tablature of the lesson in PDF and GP (GuitarPro) formats and recorded backing tracks and some exclusive lessons not posted on the public site; there’s a new lesson every Friday and no lie, it’s one of the highlights of my week.
1 Woodward makes his own music as The Inky Depths.
2 I actually think Woodward may be responsible for my own McGeoch obsessions…
