What the fuck is this?

I started at absolutely zero in April. No music background, no shortcuts, no pretending to be a teacher. Every day I practise gets a number and a video — the mistakes, the frustration, the occasional bit that finally clicks. Day 1 was genuinely Day 1, and it was terrible.

There are 205 days on the timeline now. The point was never any single video. It's what happens when you line hundreds of them up.

Three things, and that is genuinely the entire list:

• Get you to pick the guitar up. There is a guitar in the corner of an enormous number of houses and it has been there a while. Most of the battle is playing anything at all this week.
• Get you to write it down. Progress on an instrument is invisible while it's happening and obvious looking back — but only if you kept something to look back at. That's what the day count and the videos are for.
• Put you next to people doing the same thing. Learning alone is quietly miserable, and everyone here is somewhere on the same road, including the ones who are rubbish at it. Especially those.

Motivation, a record, and decent company. Everything else on this page is a detail of one of those three.

This isn't a teaching site and I'm not a teacher. Pickup Music, JustinGuitar, Simply Guitar, a pile of YouTube videos, an actual human down the road, a book from 1974 — genuinely no preference, and no affiliation with any of them. Whatever gets you playing is the right one, and I'm in no position to grade it.

This place does the other half: the bit where you practise what you learned, keep a record of it, and don't do it on your own. Learn wherever you learn. Log it here.

This is the bit people get wrong, so let me be blunt about it: I post daily. You don't have to. Every day, once a week, once a month, whenever you pick the thing up again after three weeks off — all of it counts, and none of it is measured against me.

Your day count is your days. It doesn't reset, it doesn't go down, and nobody is looking at it but you.

You can also post nothing at all. Make a profile, write a line about yourself, and just talk to people in the forum. That's a perfectly good way to use this.

Record a clip however you like — phone camera, webcam, whatever you already use — then upload it on your journey page with a line about how it went. That's the whole ritual.

There's an app that makes this easier still — you record and post in one go, without the file ever leaving your phone — but it's still in testing, so the website is the way in for now.

Ten seconds is fine. A minute is fine. Ten minutes if you're enjoying yourself. No editing, no intro, no thumbnail. It goes on your wall with the day number on it.

It doesn't have to be good. Mine wasn't. That's rather the point of filming it.

Easy to mix up, so plainly:

Your journey

The thing itself. You record when you feel like it, it goes on your wall, and it's yours. No rules, no schedule, nothing to fail. Everyone has one from the moment they join.

The Challenge

A twelve-month slice of that journey, boxed off. Same recordings, same wall — you've just drawn a line around a year of it and said that stretch counts. It has a start, an end, and one thing it asks of you.

So your journey is the place and it runs as long as you do. The Challenge is a year of it you decide to put a box around. You can have a journey for years and never touch the Challenge; you can't do the Challenge without a journey, because it's made of the same posts.

And what it measures is commitment, not progress. You could turn up for twelve straight months and still be rubbish at the end of it — that is a completed Challenge, and it counts exactly the same as anyone else's. Nobody is marking the playing. The badge is for having kept showing up, which is the hard part, and the only part anybody actually controls.

The one part with actual rules — a challenge with no requirements is just a wish. It's optional, and everything above stays true whether you join it or not.

What it asks

Twelve months. One video post a month, and a post here and there in the community — that's enough. That's the whole bar. Not daily, not perfect, not impressive.

Miss a month and you haven't failed anything. You just haven't banked that one.

Why bother

Because a year is the length of time where you stop being someone who's trying to learn guitar and start being someone who plays a bit of guitar. Almost nobody gets there, and almost everybody who doesn't quit somewhere in the boring middle where nothing seems to improve.

The Challenge exists to get you through that bit. Twelve months of evidence, in your own hand, that you kept turning up — which is worth more when it's hard to look at than when it's easy.

What you get

• 🏆 Year One on your profile, permanently. It sits beside your name everywhere you post — the forum, your journey, day comments. It doesn't expire and it can't be bought.
• A year of your own playing, in order. The reason most people never see their own progress is that they never recorded the beginning. You will have.
• Free Band Membership for life. Twelve qualifying months of the Challenge and twelve months of paid membership, and then the payments stop for good. You keep every Band Member perk — the early videos, the Band Hangouts, the chat — and you never pay for any of it again. Your profile reads Lifetime Band Member. Earned, never sold.

Crew can do the whole Challenge and get the badge. The free-for-life Band Membership is the one part that needs the payments behind it, because what you're being handed back is twelve months of the thing you paid for.

Everything that makes this what it is is free and stays free: every daily video, your own journey, commenting, the forum, your profile — and the whole Challenge, badge included. A free account isn't a trial and it isn't a lesser version. It's the thing.

Membership is £4.95 a month and it buys nice-to-haves, not the point: new videos about three days early, the Band Hangouts where we practise together with cameras on, the members' chat, and a badge. It also keeps the lights on here, which is the honest reason it exists.

See exactly what's in each →

Accountability, mostly. It's very hard to quietly give up when a numbered public record says you showed up. And if watching a genuinely average person struggle through the awkward phase helps someone else start — or start again — even better.

If I can do this, you definitely can. I'm not being nice. I've seen the footage.