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rant: youtube guitar videos

Monday Jul 9th 2007

Are guitar videos on YouTube bad?

Nope.

It’s the comments that make them suck.

Everyone, repeat, everyone that leaves comments on YouTube guitar videos is a guitar expert. No, really. Seriously. Can’t you tell I’m being serious? Obviously I’m not serious.

What is true is that the commenters think they know everything there is to know about guitar.

It’s enough to make you want to bash your head into your computer keyboard. Several times.

The hater comments I can deal with because you more or less have to. You’ll always find some hater who writes single-word comments like "gay" or "faggit" (and yes it’s always misspelled). Those are at least easy to ignore. What gets me are the idiots that start giving dissertations on music theory in the comments.

Example: "The video was good, but the intonation of the harmonic was slightly off in the third measure."

1. No one gives a shit how much you know about music theory. Not even other musicians.
2. The fact you know music theory doesn’t mean you know anything about music.
3. Suggesting to someone how to play after a video is already completed shows you’re arrogant and stupid. As if the author of the video is going to go back and re-record the song just for you. Don’t think so.
4. If you make comments like that but have no videos showing all that you know (supposedly) about music on your YouTube account, try actually to oh, I dunno, post a video for once. Then maybe your words will actually hold some weight. Actually, scratch that - you’re a music theory nerd and therefore have no conception of what it’s like to feel music, so we already know any video you post would suck.
5. Don’t even bother claiming a masterfully played piece is "easy" unless you’ve got a video proving you can do it . Otherwise, you’re lying.

For most guitar videos on YouTube I will purposely resize my browser window to completely avoid seeing the comments. At least then I can watch it without the comments from the peanut gallery.

I have written YouTube more than once (but gave up) asking them to put in a feature that would simply turn off comments. It’d be great if there was an option in your profile that would by default not show them. For any video you watch, there would be a small button that says "Show Comments", where you would physically have to click in order to see them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be there at all.

I so wish that feature existed…

*sigh*

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