About Maximum Musician.com

I'm Darrin Koltow, webmaster of MaximumMusician.com. And this page has a bit of my personal history as it relates to playing guitar.

I started playing guitar when I was 18, which was over twenty years ago. I wanted to play at least as well as John Fogerty, but Mark Knopfler would have been even better. I took some lessons, which were given the Old School way: open position chords, Mel Bay, book 1 and maybe a tune's chord changes. The F major chord at position one nearly made me give up guitar right then. The whole learning process was slow and frustrating.

One day my guitar teacher played a simple melody and asked me to play it back, note for note, just by listening to it. I couldn't do it. He gave up on me then, and I gave up on lessons. I wanted so much to have incredible skill, but my picture of getting that skill looked like a mountain that was impossible to climb.

But I struggled on. On my own, I managed to start figuring out melodies by ear. That was an incredible feeling. Then, listening carefully, I slowly began figuring out chords to tunes, which was also an incredible feeling.

But I still didn't understand how chords, rhythm and other musical bits fit together. I couldn't make the guitar sound good and didn't know what to practice. Frustrated, I gave up playing seriously and practicing every day. I resigned myself to strumming some basic chords every so often.

Fast forward several years. Some bug in my head kept telling me, "try again." So I started daily practice again. I pretty much locked myself in my condo and committed to getting all the guitar skill and music knowledge I could. I began practicing for hours a day and studying theory books. It was slow going, but I loved the work. A lot of that work involved writing my own exercises, many of which took me down dead-ends. But I read how other players practiced and my exercises got better.

Somewhere along the way, I started sounding good, and really understanding music -- and how to play with music, including improvising and writing my own arrangements. The musical "mountain" I used to think I would never be able to climb turned into something else: a maze, filled with amazing sounds and sensations. It feels like that to me now. Playing guitar has become like this fantastic, infinitely extensible erector set, with endless things to build, explore and enjoy.

I decided to share the joy, to teach others. I failed. I was teaching them the same things that I was first taught, and this meant struggling with that old C chord, alternate picking, and changing chords -- all at once. On top of all that, I had students trying to figure out how music itself worked.

I gave up teaching but I kept thinking about it. My main question was so simple: how can I make learning as easy and fun as possible for total beginners?

I locked myself in another condo and thought and wrote and thought some more about it. And answers started coming. Here are some of them:

- Show students how to play by ear

- Show students how to teach themselves

- Maybe most important, for pure beginners: show them how to make music with the smallest amount of technical skill.

A lightbulb went on in my head. I knew how to teach a student her first chord: show her the one-finger mini-bar across strings 2 through 4. On that one shape, and the idea behind it, I developed a whole approach that replaced struggling and hopelessness with incredible fun, all using simple chord shapes and movements. This approach gives beginners exactly what they need to start making music quickly. And it also allows them to comfortably and naturally build increasingly complex material onto the simple shapes.

This approach feels revolutionary to me and I hope it feels like great fun to you. You can begin the One-Finger lesson series here.

If you have any comments or questions about this page or about the other material on this site, drop me a line here.