I'm Dave Keller, the person behind My Guitar Day. I've been a product designer at startups for 15 years, and this is where that work meets my years teaching guitar. You can see my other work at kidastro.com.
I started playing in middle school in a small farming town in Idaho, when a friend showed me you could play "Nothing Else Matters" with just open strings. I learned off printed tabs from weird corners of the early internet and tab books from the music store — two weeks on the "Alive" solo, tape rewound a hundred times.
Through college and after, teaching guitar was my job: forty students a week at a music school, then Saturdays at Santa Monica School of Music. Half-hour lessons, hundreds of times a year. What I learned in that room: nobody is motivated by technique. You're motivated by a song.
Get someone playing something that sounds sorta like the song and they'll come back forever — the technique follows.
I'm 47 now. I still play two hours a day, in a hardcore metal band and a grunge cover band, and when I sub on bass I get a week to learn 45 songs off YouTube. Every lesson I ever needed is out there, free, taught by phenomenal teachers. My Guitar Day curates that work and organizes it into your next half hour, whenever you show up.
It's not a replacement for a teacher — if you can get real, in-person feedback, do it, and show your teacher this. It's the habit in between.
— Dave Keller