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Expat Argentina Life

Learning Guitar – Introducing Vizzy Guitar

When I went back to college for my sophomore year at Cal I brought with me my Mom’s old nylon string acoustic guitar and a burning desire to learn how to play it.

Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” was the 1st song I learned to play. Followed by Led Zeppelin’s “Baby I’m Gonna Leave You”. And then Green Day. Lots of Green Day.

Back then my friends showed me how to play the songs. Fast forward 10 years and I’m still learning to play songs albeit with a much larger breadth of tools available for use.

When I learn a song on guitar there several very handy resources that I use –

When I went back to college for my sophomore year at Cal I brought with me my Mom’s old nylon string acoustic guitar and a burning desire to learn how to play it.

Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” was the 1st song I learned to play. Followed by Led Zeppelin’s “Baby I’m Gonna Leave You”. And then Green Day. Lots of Green Day.

Back then my friends showed me how to play the songs. Fast forward 10 years and I’m still learning to play songs albeit with a much larger breadth of tools available for use.

When I learn a song on guitar there several very handy resources that I use –

  • Recording of the actual song
  • Chords
  • Lyrics
  • Videos of other people playing the song
  • Videos of people teaching how to play the song
  • Image of how to play a particular chord on guitar

One article I studied on building your entrepreneurial skills encouraged the readers to take note of the problems in their life and dedicate to solving them and sharing that solution with others.

As I sat there one Sunday attempting to learn a song with a large guitar in my lap, pick held between my teeth, trying to flip between various YouTube videos and other websites with lyrics and tab I realized a huge problem was staring me in the face.

The problem is that these 5 resources that help me quickly and efficiently learn a song all exist in different areas of the web. I have to hunt and search to find what I need. Harder still is that I need to switch between programs or internet tabs to view the multiple sources of information.

Now factor in that I have a guitar in my lap and a pick in my fingers and surfing the web becomes that much harder.

What would severely scratch my itch is a web app that takes all the tools I need and puts them into a single, easily consumable page.

Enter an easier way to learn guitar songs – VizzyGuitar.com

I sketched up the concept for the site and put a couple of ads on freelancing sites to see how much developers would charge me to create my masterpiece. After seeing the outrageous quotes of over US $1000, I realized that aside from not wanting to pay someone that much money, nobody will ever commit the same level of passion to this project that I will. So I decided to code it myself.

I took one coding class at Cal so I understood the basics however I still needed to learn a lot. For the last 4 weeks the website StackOverFlow.com has been my best friend as I attempt to code new pieces of functionality.

There were many frustrating afternoons as I struggled to get my code working but I’m very proud to say I finished it. And even better — it works!!

I have a lot more ideas for features that I want to add but more important right now is getting the site into the hands of users and getting some feedback.

So the site is live with the minimum viable features that make it useful. I look forward to growing the site using the feedback from my guitar playing friends and those who stumble upon vizzyguitar.com.

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My girlfriend took this photo of me playing guitar (or maybe just posing like I am) at Chrissy Field with Alcatraz in the background.

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