Til review: the best way to take video lessons with real teachers?
There are many, many online guitar learning platforms out there. A lot of them are pitched as direct replacements for human teachers. However Til is quite the opposite. Today we’re talking about a relatively new service that aims to connect you directly with real teachers through an innovative and accessible platform.
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What is Til?
Til is, essentially, a very modern way of putting you, a guitarist who wants to take some lessons, in touch with the right teacher. There are no extra learning resources here, no subscription fee beyond what you pay in lesson fees – it’s just aiming to be a centralised and easy way of letting you take private and group video guitar lessons.
Is Til any good?
In short: absolutely. I had a very positive experience with the platform itself and the lessons I took. Let’s start with the platform.
There are three main things Til does – first, it lets you browse from its library of teachers, and find a private tutor or a group lesson whose pricing and availability works for you. From here, rather than just being given their email, you’re connected to this group or tutor in a server-style chat, where materials can be shared outside of the actual video lessons. Til then also hosts the video lessons itself, rather than kicking you off the platform to do the lesson through another service like Zoom.
Browsing lessons
Teachers on Til are presented in a nice modern interface – clean and spacious layout host vertical introduction videos, in a way that’ll be familiar if you’ve ever browsed a site like Airbnb. You can filter by availability, style and experience level, meaning you’re not sifting through a load of shredders who only do lessons at 3 AM your time unless you want to. Click on a teacher or a group class and you get a short introductory video, as well as a bio and some other highlights such as the teacher’s YouTube channel or Instagram feed, as well as their price per lesson. You can then go ahead and start booking to see their available time-slots.
I’m reviewing Til from the UK, and given that a good number of the teachers are US-based, it would perhaps be helpful to see their full availability right away, rather than having to start the booking process – this just meant one more click before I discovered the times wouldn’t work out, as the filter categories for time availability were pretty broad. But this is obviously a very minor issue, and on a more positive note Til automatically converts everything to my time zone, so I’m not worried about accidentally booking a lesson for 1 AM. If I do, there’s a full refund policy up until 24 hours beforehand.
Taking lessons
So, lesson booked, I proceed to the chat with the teacher. This is a messaging service that lets you talk to your teacher ahead of the class to let them know your goals. Your teacher can share things like tabs and chord charts, and you can share your own progress via videos. In the context of group lessons, all of the students taking the course are in the chat, and can share their progress with the whole class.
Taking the actual lessons on Til is a very easy experience – I am particularly impressed with Til’s technical performance. You don’t need anything other than what you need to make a video call on a laptop, phone or tablet. It’s important that Til is hosting the video calls itself rather than using a third-party service like Zoom, as regular video-call platforms can be a pain for music lessons. By default, they do their best to cut out any audio that isn’t the human voice.
On Til, guitar playing comes through loud and clear in both directions – an unplugged electric was loud enough for me, and so acoustics or an amp at sensible practice level will also be fine. The main thing is – you don’t need a fancy mixer or interface setup to put your playing across to your teacher.
The video lessons are also recorded and put into the chat with the teacher, allowing you to look over the lesson at your own pace. If it’s a group class, this is particularly handy, as it means you can join group courses that don’t actually work for you timing wise, and catch up with the lessons afterwards – but still participate in group discussions and share your playing for the same feedback as everyone else.
What did I get out of using Til?
This is very much a review of Til, not of the teachers I happened to book lessons with, however I do think in talking about an online learning platform that actually interfaces you with real humans rather than videos or smart tabs, it’s worth going over what I found different about this aspect of the experience.
As someone who’s looked at their fair share of learning platforms, from traditional video libraries to smartphone apps and everything in between, the difference talking to an experienced human being makes cannot be overstated.
By just watching my playing technique and listening to me play, the teachers I take lessons with on Til pretty instantly identify areas that need to work on – things that I would never really have noticed if I was just noodling away in front of pre-recorded video lessons.
Is Til worth it?
It is inevitable that taking lessons with a teacher is much, much pricier than simply paying for access to a lesson library or an app – however, the range of prices are all very reasonable rates for experienced teachers. Til gives you access to some serious guitar talent: Professor Molly Miller, one of the most renowned educators within guitar, teaches regular group courses. There are lessons from the guitarists behind some major names – Hanan Rubinstein, for instance, has played with Alicia Keys and Ed Sheeran. I took a lesson with Stuart Ryan, a fantastic teacher and player, on top of being a UK session stalwart. And when Til grants you access to lessons from Bob Lanzetti – Grammy-winning founding member of Snarky Puppy – for $95/hour, that’s a pretty notable thing.
What I also want to note is how Til’s recording feature plays into its value proposition, too. Over a while, you’ll gradually be paying to build up a library of video lessons, all tailored exactly for you, to revisit. While Til’s pricing is obviously a major step up from what you might pay for a set of video lessons or a subscription to an app, so is the level of personalised teaching you receive. And, refreshingly, you only pay for what you pay for – you’re not subscribing for access, which is a model that lets you really keep things at the right level for you.
Til is a relatively new platform, and I can only see it getting bigger and better as more teachers join, and having previously been so used to the slightly impersonal nature of video lessons and smart solutions, I can’t really recommend it enough.
Find out more and sign up at https://www.til.co/guitardotcom.
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