Do you ever wonder why some guitar lesson videos get more views than others? If you’re a content creator of course you do! It’s your goal to be seen by a wide audience and promote yourself to the world in the best possible light.
The good news is you don’t have to have the prettiest face on the planet, but there are some things you DO have to have which are easy to get if you follow some basic principles
Ask yourself “Why would someone want to watch MY video?” The answer is always – they want something to help them achieve THEIR goals. Your job is to give them exactly that.
The best way is to give honest information, communicated simply and presented professionally. Trust me, they’ll come running back for more.
The following are my 5 tips for making better guitar lesson videos.
1. Use a script or storyline
Make sure you do things in the right order. Demonstrate what you’re teaching FIRST. In other words play a short demo of the piece of music you intend to teach BEFORE you break it down. If you don’t do that you’ll lose your potential viewers almost before you get started.
After you’ve captured their attention by playing the song they hope to learn they’re more likely to stay with you the whole way. You’re building respect by delivering this way.
You can now break it down using a script or storyline you’ve prepared earlier. You don’t have to stick entirely to the script. It’s nice to have a bit of spontaneity but it must also have continuity.
Wait until the end of the video to do your sales pitch. As a viewer there’s nothing worse than listening to someone asking you to subscribe to their channel before you’ve had a chance to see what they’re all about.
2. Show your face on camera
Sure, there are plenty of guitar instructional videos on YouTube which demonstrate a song with a close-up of the guitar only. These are fine, but the BEST and most popular videos show the instructor’s face proudly talking directly to the camera.
Viewers prefer to connect to a PERSON and this is done by looking into your eyes! You don’t have to be the most beautiful person in the world but you DO have to be authentic. You can still cut in to close-ups of the guitar as the video progresses then out again for variation.
If you’re camera shy and you feel that you need a little help there’s no shortage of books on public speaking to get you on your way. This is a worthwhile skill to have as it is can definitely help in other areas of your life too!
3. Get the lighting right
This is one of the hardest things to do properly but it’s well worth the effort BEFORE you shoot the video and realize it’s all unusable. As they say – you want to be seen in the best possible light (pun intended).
The obvious thing is to light up the subject but there’s a bit more to it than that. You will more than likely need at least three lights. The strongest one is the main light which lights up you and your guitar. An additional couple of less bright fill lights will take away any harsh shadows.
The best idea I’ve come across is to use a dimmable ring light as your main light source. These are great. They’re placed on a tripod with your camera and produce a nice smooth natural light reducing harsh shadows.
The fill lights will have to have some sort of diffusion. If they don’t come with a diffuser already built in you might have to be creative and come up with your own. One idea is to hang some paper lanterns above the subject out of the frame. Another is to hang white material over the lights themselves. Whatever you do, try to make it easy to recreate exactly the same for your next video.
Experiment with the placement of all your lights and shoot video as you go, reviewing it often. Eventually you’ll know what works best for the effect you want. It’s worth spending a lot of time on this as it will help to create continuity across all your videos if you use the same setup.
4. Use an external microphone
While your smartphone might be good enough to record a reasonable quality video it definitely does not cut it with the audio!
If you want to sound professional, one basic piece of equipment you absolutely must invest in is a reasonable quality condenser microphone. Along with that you’ll need an audio interface or small USB mixer to connect to your computer.
Microphone placement is very important and requires trial and error until you find the right position for the best sound. There’s no one size fits all rule here. It depends very much on the acoustics of your room along with the type of instrument you’re playing.
It’s a good idea to record audio with both your camera AND external mic so you can use the camera audio to sync the video to the external mic audio in the editing stage.
5. Get yourself a decent video editing program
There’s a fair chance that you already have a video editing program installed on your computer. That would probably be Windows Movie Maker (PC) or iMovie (Mac).
These programs work for basic no frills editing, sort of. My advice would be to step it up a notch and get something that will add a little pizzazz to your videos. When I say pizzazz I don’t mean jamming your videos with filters and effects.
What you need is a few more features such as the ability to edit multiple cameras so you can show different angles of your guitar. A split screen feature would be useful for close-up shots and also to show Tab up on the screen at the same time if you want.
It would be nice to have more control of your audio editing within the video editor too. The list could go on but that would be a minimum to start with. There are a plethora of video editors out there and this blog isn’t going to go into the pros and cons of each one.
So that’s it, they’re my 5 tips for making better guitar lesson videos. I hope it helps. Have I missed anything? Probably. I’d really like to see the videos you make so go ahead and post your video links in the comments section below if you like, along with any other ideas or feedback you have.
