Hey, how are you doing? Justin here, with a video I recorded on August 1, 2023.

Twenty years ago today, I launched the very first JustinGuitar website. It seems so long ago! My life has changed so much since then. This morning, I thought about what I'd like to do on the website in the next 20 years. I was going to do something like "JustinGuitar Reacts" to one of the early videos, but as I looked through those early videos, so many memories came back. So I decided to give you a little rundown on how JustinGuitar.com started and go through a few early videos. I'll tell you some funny stories about behind-the-scenes stuff, what was happening in my life, and how it all came about.

🎂 How long have you been learning with me? You can join this Community discussion and let me know how the site impacted your life; my ops manager started the "celebration" vibes there, and I've had a great time reading all your kind comments and birthday wishes!

Let's get stuck in and chat about the story of JustinGuitar. I hope you enjoy it!

The Early Days

I can't exactly remember how I got into websites, but I do remember a friend of mine, Cyan, who taught me the basics of HTML, and I made a website for my band at the time. I was already doing a lot of teaching. I was teaching at the Guitar Institute, a posh boarding school called Wellington College, and doing a lot of private teaching. I've always been teaching ever since I was a little kid! Teaching has always been part of my game.

Justin Sandercoe playing guitar when he was a young kid.

I was playing with the Counterfeit Stones, the most famous Rolling Stones tribute band in England, according to Mick Jagger. We were touring a lot, so much of the early website was just text and little notations. A lot was done on the back of the tour bus driving from venue to venue while we were on tour!

It was mostly a promotional thing. If I got an inquiry from a new student, I could say, "Here's an example of some of the lessons I can do," but it was mostly text and images. Later on, I incorporated some audio. I remember getting quite excited about getting emails from all around the world from people saying, "Oh, I really enjoyed that lesson," or "You explained that well," or whatever. It was exciting to be on the internet! It seemed like a very new thing. It was still all dial-up and very slow, but feeling like I was part of this thing was exciting! No one knew where it would go, but it felt like it was somewhere positive. The internet would be the way of the future, and it's turned out like that for me and my work situation!

🎸 I hesitate to call it work. I get to play guitar and muck around the studio every day. It's hardly any work. :)

Anyway, the website was mostly text for that time, and then YouTube came along. I can't exactly remember what happened, but I had quit the Counterfeit Stones and was playing with Katie Melua's band. I lived in an apartment in Chiswick High Road in West London, above the optometrist's place. I had two apartments - I lived in one and built a recording studio in the other.

I remember seeing YouTube and thinking, "Oh, well, we can do video. That will be so good for doing guitar lessons, like video guitar lessons." I had no idea about videos or video editing. I remember my friend Jed had done some video stuff, so I rang him and said, "Hey, would you come and film some videos?" He kindly came over, and we filmed five or six video lessons.

🪂 Interestingly, the first video on my YouTube Channel was a skydiving video. If I remember rightly, you had to upload a video when signing up for a YouTube channel; the only video I had on my computer was this skydiving one!

The first guitar video on my Main YouTube Channel was Silent Night, the Christmas classic. You can't even see my eyes, just these dark spots where they should be. I was so skinny! :) It was interesting to see the drum kit in the background…

There was a pub behind my flat called Sam's Bar, where we often hung out. Quite often, late at night, my friends would show up, and we'd end up piling into my studio to have a jam. I remember one of the neighbors sent a message saying, "You know, Jimi Hendrix would be turning in his grave or something. You guys should stick to your day jobs." I remember finding that funny because almost every person there was a professional musician. Whoever wrote that got it slightly wrong. :)

We used a handheld camera in my first videos. Back then, I used to have a long video introduction, and no one cared. I used to wear a funny beanie all the time, and I hadn't shaved. The sitting-on-the-floor thing started around this time, and I didn't used to wear shoes. My first videos would teach Major Scales and Finger Tapping!

YouTube was so new, and this wasn't my job. It was just something fun to do between tours and writing. I always felt privileged that I could make a living out of music. I'm lucky to have fallen into this journey where I get to do something that I have loved my entire life. There was an element of these early days of YouTubing where I was like, "If I can help people get better at guitar and enjoy the instrument and play some songs that they love, then that's already kind of giving back to music a little bit." I always felt like that was important!

Jazz Up Your Blues!

One of my first series, Jazz Up Your Blues, has an interesting backstory about the. They were some of the first videos that I edited on my own. Jedi had done nearly all the editing, and at this point, I was trying to figure out how to do the editing on my laptop when I was on tour. The night before the Jazz Up Your Blues video, I'd been sitting on the hotel roof with Jeff Beck, Tal Wilkenfeld, Jason Rubello, Vinnie Collier, and several other famous musicians. It was an incredible night!

That moment was the turning point for me for YouTube. I filmed these videos, edited some, and put them live. Then, I went away to the gig, did the gig, came back, and the videos had more views than there were people in the audience at that festival. I said, "Yeah, this YouTube thing is something I should be pursuing." It wasn't that long after that I quit that band and went full-time to doing YouTube videos.

Full-Time YouTuber

Interestingly, I did another version of Silent Night one year later. How much did I learn? :) One thing I became conscious of is that I was always smacking my lips together; people used to say, "Stop smacking your lips together!" and I'd watch it back and realize, "Oh yeah, I'm doing that." :) My new setup looked nicer; I had some lights going on and a lapel mic clipped onto my t-shirt, improving the sound quality.

Something interesting was happening when I released the Power Chord video. Aside from the atrocious haircut and the big rack of stuff that I had, it was a period where I was using a lot of rock guitar things. I was at my first big recording studio, taking a room in Hugh Padgham's recording studio. It was the Stanley House in Acton, a dodgy location between an industrial park and sewage treatment works. But it was an amazing recording studio full of amazing musicians! Some killer people were around in 10 recording studios, including the producer who did a lot of stuff with Phil Collins and the Police/Sting.

A great hub! Everyone was doing a lot of pop songwriters and library music, pulling ideas and planning on each other's records. It was an amazing, vibrant time for me. I was doing a lot of touring then, so I'd be back in the studio for a few weeks, doing sessions, filming lessons, and then I'd disappear on tour for three or four months or whatever and then come back. I had an amazing time at Stanley House, and I'll be forever thankful for the people I met there!

I became a better teacher, and hanging out with people doing sessions and proper records made a big difference!

The JustinGuitar Hat

The JustinGuitar hat first appeared on the Guitar Lesson for Complete Beginners video! Pretty atrocious-looking shirt there, playing a Maton Messiah, the same acoustic guitar I still have! That was a great time, still in Stanley House - just the opposite side of the room!

🤠 These days, I mostly wear the hat because I have a microphone in it. It's not so much that I'm fussed about losing my hair or anything like that. I'm losing my hair, but I'm not bothered about it. :)

The First Beginner Course

I'm okay at guitar but not incredible - I'm a good teacher because I can break down fairly complex ideas. I always had courses on the website and felt like my superpower wasn't playing guitar but working out a progression of things to learn, making a difficult thing easier by breaking it into many component pieces to teach people how to play.

Fourteen years ago, I became more serious about making YouTube videos and writing courses. I got into remaking a Beginner Guitar Course, and I scripted it all, planning all the learning paths and how students should practice.

I filmed the new Beginner Course videos at my friend Jed's house. We had lighting here, and we hired a Sony camera. It was a big step up in production. Jed did amazing work here! He worked hard filming and editing the stuff. We could have done it better with the gear I've got now, but this was massive at the time.

A Bigger Studio!

When the YouTube channel started doing better, I moved to the upstairs studio in the Stanley House, which had a separate live room. So I had one room full of all my guitars and amps all set up with mics and stuff all the time, and then I had a nice recording studio in the other half of it.

The beautiful brown leather sofa wasn't a great functional sofa, but I loved it! It wasn't mine - it was Hugh Padgham's sofa, the producer I mentioned that owned the building, and his wife, a clothes designer or fashion designer called Cath Kidston, decided that she wanted their sofa back, so I lost it. :( I was very sad when it left!

The Blanket!

The blanket first appeared on the Functioning & Static Chords, and it came about because I used to nap during the day. I started working early in the morning, and after lunch, I would normally nap, covering myself up with that blanket. :) Quite practical!

Volunteering in Ghana

I went to Ghana with my girlfriend, and through the website and YouTube, we raised quite a few thousand pounds and bought a load of pens, t-shirts, and medicines to donate in Ghana.

🖊️ Pens were a big thing over there, so we've got boxes and boxes of pens. The kids would just run up to you if you were some sort of volunteer there, and they'd just be asking for pens right away that they could use at school.

We volunteered in an orphanage there in Pando, Kpando, in the Volta region of Ghana. I'm so thankful I did. It was an amazing and humbling experience!

This experience made me more appreciative of my life and realized how people can be happy with not very much. A lot of the people that we met there had next to nothing. I won't dwell on that too much, but that was an amazing experience. If you want to watch the little videos, there's even a funny one where I attempt to teach music notation to a school in Ghana, and they're schooling me in rhythms. Their sense of rhythm and groove playing drums is awesome and made me feel inadequate. :)

Interviews, Original Music, & AC/DC

The day I was supposed to interview Pat Martino, someone broke into my car, parked close to the Stanley House - which used to be a tricky, dangerous neighborhood. Now it's all gentrified, and only wealthy people live there, but at that time, it was pretty gnarly, so somebody had smashed the windows of my car when I went down to drive to interview Pat Martino. A bummer! It's the only interview on my site that I didn't do - my friend Pete Whittard interviewed him for me.

Around that time, I also got an album out - "Small Town Eyes," produced by a guy called Fessa, a great producer. We got a lot of good sounds there, but I've taken it off Spotify because I hated the sound of my voice when I listened back to it. I'm doing okay singing now, but it wasn't any good at that time. That album hardly sold any records, but I mostly sold out the Bush Hall, a concert venue in London, and I played it with my band.

🎵 I have a song tutorial for my song From Katie's Window. I think that stands up an instrumental tune. 🙂

Around that time, there was also an AC/DC "Shoot to Thrill" competition. It was amazing because AC/DC got involved! Their record company emailed and said, "Hey, we'd love for you to do a lesson on this song because we're going to promote it because it's on this film. Would you do it?" It was the first time I had contact with a record label that was actively going, "This guy can reach the people that we want to be able to advertise to." Very interesting experience!

I solidified many things in my presentation: the hat, blanket, and sofa. Then, on November 14, 2010, I interviewed Steve Vai. That was a big deal for me! It was one of the first major interviews I had ever done, and Steve is such an amazing guy. He is down-to-earth, helpful, friendly, and full of pearls of wisdom. The guy seems to speak, and amazing things come out. I was very, very nervous to meet Steve Vai!

🤘 When I was a teenager, I loved Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and Eric Johnson. I spent a lot of my tens of thousands of hours probably learning Metal tunes. I didn't pursue shreddy Rock and got more involved with Jazz, Blues, songwriting, and production. But wow, I loved meeting Steve. It was such a thrill for me!

Around that time, I also got to interview Martin Taylor. He's another absolute proper gentleman. I've interviewed him several times, and he always has fascinating things to say.

At that moment, I worked on my Ear Training Method and interviewed Jim Campilongo. He was amazing! He is such a fantastic guitar player, an absolute hero of mine. He has a unique voice and personality when he plays and is a great guitar player! We filmed the interview in his apartment in Brooklyn. It was one of the first few times I went to New York to hang out with other musicians, and hooking up with Jim was a real big deal. It was amazing to realize the reach of the internet and that I could contact people from far away, and there was a chance they'd be interested in chatting with me!

10 Years Ago…

I was releasing a lot of lessons on 12 Bar Blues and original Blues solos. I also met Mike Dawes 10 years ago. It was the first time I met him, and I remember seeing that video of him doing the "Somebody That I Used to Know" thing and going, "Oh my God, this guy's incredible." I emailed him, and almost a week later, he just came to the studio, and we hung out, jammed, and went for food.

Michael Fix was also there, and Gordon Giltrap used to get loads of people popping by the studio, then people in the building recording something else, and they'd pop in. I never did get to meet Dominic Miller, who had a room opposite mine for a little while, nor Pete Gordino, a fantastic keyboard player who plays with Depeche Mode. I should have interviewed them, but I never got around to it.

Ten years ago, the first We Came as Strangers album came out. We Came as Strangers is still technically going, but we've all paused because we've all had kids. This band was one of my proudest moments. Four of my great friends got together in a house for two weeks in a residential recording studio, and we just made a record in two weeks from nothing. We didn't even know each other. We just went there and said, "Okay, we got two weeks. Let's write some tunes." We spent the whole day jamming and trying out ideas, and then drilled it down, took the idea, and got it into a song.

Ellen, the singer, would go off and work on the lyrics while we'd be tracking up stuff. We've done three albums now, and each was done in two weeks, only from scratch, with no songs at all. We finished the whole album and usually mixed it afterward!

💙 I love We Came as Strangers. I think it's important that I still have this passion for making music and writing songs because that motivates me to do lessons. After all, 20 years is a long time to be doing that. I must start cultivating it again because it's been a little while since I've done a record, and it's the thing that keeps it all fresh for me, keeps me excited, and keeps everything fairly new.

The second album of We Came as Strangers was eight years ago. I was mindful of trying to keep content coming out on the YouTube channels all the time, so I had lick lessons and the Blues Lead Guitar series. Interestingly, we're looking at revamping that very soon.

Recent Years

The Stanley House got sold, and they turned it into a flat, which was an absolute bummer. It was a great music studio and a very sad loss for music. I had to move to another studio. Again, it was full of great, but mostly pop, songwriters in that building. Charlie Hugo, the producer, was in the room behind mine, and there was always this funny thing like if he was tracking stuff, I had to go, "Hey man, I'm filming. Can you keep the volume down for a little bit?" And he'd be quiet while I filmed, and then it'd be like he could make a racket again.

It was around this time as well that I got the Kemper, and that was a game-changer for me as far as my audio quality went because, before that, it was always like setting up a microphone into an app, putting it through a preamp, recording it into Pro Tools. It was a lot of mucking around, and I wasn't paying as much attention to it as I should have, especially as I was doing a lot of recording sessions. I should have paid more attention to the audio quality of those early lessons.

Eventually, we sold up our flat and moved out to Farnam in Surrey, and I converted a pretty decent-sized wine cellar into my recording studio. Moving out of London was a big deal, and I was scared. I thought it would be terrible, but I wish I'd done it years ago. I love living in the countryside, in the fresh air, and walking the dog in the woods instead of running around in smoggy streets.

I've been writing the guitar techniques magazine guys, Nev and Jason, for around six years. I've been writing the guitar magazine article. I've also recorded the Rut Busters series, and hooking up with Lee Anderson was great. He's become a really good friend of mine. I love his whole vibe! I also started doing dog walks and guitar talks content and working more on the audio and video quality. I learned a bit about color grading, shooting, and more.

I was in that same studio for a couple of years until lockdown. During that time, I taught Tammy, Lee, Ariel Posen, Chris Buck, and many other people also came to hang out. It was a fun time, and I did things that I never dreamed of doing as a kid. I learned to play left-handed, and you can still see the left-handed PRS up there, which reminds me of all the things I went through to learn.

Lockdown, New Studio, and Team!

There was a little period during lockdown when I had to rent a studio because we were renovating the house. It was a rough time, but I'm thankful I could still work and help people through the lockdown. The pandemic was amazing for JustinGuitar as a business because everyone was stuck at home playing guitar. What better way to spend your time stuck at home than learning something new?

Then, I moved back to my house - the studio where I am now. My friend Lee helped me set up the lights and cameras, and I've tweaked it a little since then. The first lesson I released on my Main YouTube Channel in the new studio was the 6 Guitar Areas You Should Practice.

JustinGuitar expanded during the lockdown, and I could hire full-time employees. I found an amazing operations manager, Laryne, who oversees almost everything. We also had great developers, Ben and Mike, and now Kris, our full-time developer, and Barbara, our designer. We managed to keep growing the Community and have three moderators who do incredible work there: Lieven, Richard, and David!

I can't believe how different it was when I remember those early years! All those things that happened because I love playing guitar and sharing what I learn have enabled me to live this amazing life. Not a day goes by that I don't appreciate it. Being grateful for what we have is important for staying happy and sane.

🎯 I spent the morning thinking about everything I want to achieve in the next years. I went back through the website and noticed how many things were slightly unfinished for one reason or another, so I started making a big list of things to start ticking my way. Lots of exciting things are coming!

Personal Life

The biggest change recently in my life was just before we moved to the country: my daughter Vivi was born. That was a profound thing that changed my whole life. Suddenly, there was someone much more important to me than myself.

I worked a lot less after that. Given the choice between playing guitar or hanging out with my daughter, I will generally hang out with her. I still love playing guitar, but my daughter Vivi and partner Evelina are my priority.

I've also gotten into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, so I spend a lot of time doing that. That's my main hobby outside of the guitar. I feel sore today because I got beat up pretty badly at sparring last night. It wasn't a good one for me, and I felt bruised and sore, but it was amazing, and I can't wait to return to it tomorrow!

Thank You!

I want to finish off with a few big thank-yous. I'm worried about forgetting people, so if you've worked with me and helped me on my journey, I massively appreciate you. A lot is happening in my head, but a couple of big standout ones are Jed Wardley, who helped me out and got me into videos in those early days. Without his help, this whole thing wouldn't have happened! Tom, from Music Sales, helped save me from getting sued by the music industry and got me into writing my books, which is amazing. The Musopia crew works on the JustinGuitar Lessons & Songs App development. Thank you!

I'm so lucky now to have the support of an amazing team: Laryne, Barbara, Kris, Lieven, Richard, David, and Jon. I know I'm going to forget people, which will make me feel terrible, but there are so many people around that help me with the site, not only the website but the design of it, constructing everything. It's amazing the support that I've had.

I save the biggest thank you to… YOU!

Thank you for being interested in what I do, learning guitar with me, leaving comments, making donations, buying t-shirts, courses, books, or whatever. All those things together have enabled me to make this thing, which I hope is an amazing resource for guitar players for many years! I have no plans on retiring anytime soon. I still love it, and I'm still passionate about it. I was so excited this morning going through and thinking about what I could do. I still have the vibe and the energy for it, so I'm hoping you'll stick with me and enjoy learning guitar with me for many years. Thanks again for the last 20 years. It's been amazing, and I appreciate it so much.

THANK YOU! 💙