That means you can play — but the instrument isn't really yours yet. The good news is the next 26 weeks were built for exactly this.
Your full 26-week roadmap is below
Keep scrolling — we walk through the fix, the week-by-week plan, and the student who started exactly where you are.
You scored in the Foundation Stage range. That's where most adult guitarists actually live — not where they think they live, where they actually live.
If you've been around the guitar for years, sometimes decades, but the fretboard has never quite become yours — that's the Foundation Stage. You can play through some songs. You know some chord shapes. You've started a few courses, watched a hundred YouTube videos, maybe owned three or four guitars.
But scales are still patterns instead of music. Improvising is the part you avoid. And the music you hear in your head still feels far away from what your hands can do.
That's not a character flaw. It's a structural gap. And it's the most fixable thing in your playing.
I'm not guessing. I see this exact playing every cohort. Tell me which of these feel familiar.
If three or more of these landed, you're in the right place.
Adult guitar education is broken. Here's how:
YouTube hands you a thousand isolated lessons with no order. Books drop you into theory without the sound of it in your ear. Apps give you patterns without context. Even private teachers — wonderful as they are — usually teach you the song you came in with. They don't build the foundation underneath every song you'll ever play.
So you've been collecting pieces. Some great pieces. But pieces.
The reason you can't tie it together isn't because you haven't worked hard enough. It's because nobody handed you the map.
Every adult guitarist I've taught who landed at the Foundation Stage had the same story: years of effort, scattered across dozens of sources, with no through-line. One year of obsession, two years of drift. One course finished, three abandoned. A teacher you liked, but who taught you songs instead of the instrument.
You don't need more information. You need the order. That's what the 26-Week is.
Three things, repeated for six months:
A clear path. 26 weeks, in order. Mindset and the picking hand. The major scale across the neck. The pentatonic in every position. Triads and their inversions. Real harmony. Real soloing. Lofi. The jazz vocabulary. The blues, deeper. Each week building on the one before.
Personal feedback. You film yourself once a week. Not for performance — for me. I watch the video. I tell you exactly what's working and what to fix. This is the part you can't get from a course you bought once and watched alone.
A small cohort. 10 students. Not 100. Not a Zoom grid. A small group of fellow grown adults — half of them are doctors, the rest are senior professionals — who are doing the work alongside you. Every two weeks we get on a call. I review your playing. The cohort sees each other improve in real time.
30–60 minutes a day, six days a week. That's the ask.
By week 26, the music in your head and the music in your hands stop being two different things.
This is the path. Every week is one focused theme. Each builds on the last.
The mental and physical foundation under everything else. How to actually practice. The picking hand. Subdivisions, time, rhythm. The link between your right hand and left hand becomes solid.
Two scales. Five positions each. Across the neck. By the end of week 4, you'll know where every note in C major lives — and you'll hear it, not just see it.
The shift from "I can play these notes" to "I can hear these notes." Singing scale degrees. Tagging the sound. The bridge between fingers and ear that most adult players never build.
Connecting the five positions into one fretboard. The moment the neck stops feeling like five separate boxes and starts feeling like one instrument.
3rds, 6ths, 7ths, 10ths, octaves — the building blocks every melody you've ever loved is made of.
The moment chord shapes stop being shapes and start being music. Closed-position triads. Open triads. Inversions in context. Voice leading. By week 12, you'll be playing through real chord progressions with intention.
Building solos by manipulating a single phrase. Add a note. Change a rhythm. Repeat with variation. Then a full G blues, top to bottom — the structure of a real solo.
Secondary dominants. Tonic, subdominant, dominant motion. Common tones. Chord-tone soloing. The thing every player you admire is doing that you can't quite name yet.
A refresh of everything from the first half — but deeper. Subdivisions, phrasing, the time inside your playing. The week your scales stop sounding like exercises.
1-color songs. Beautiful chord shapes. Finger-picking loops. The sound that makes Pat Metheny and modern jazz guitar feel possible.
F7, Fm7, Fmaj7, Fm7b5. The shapes every jazz tune is built on. Voice leading between them. Real jazz vocabulary, finally.
Beyond the pentatonic box. The phrasing, feel, and harmonic vocabulary of real blues. The ear of a player, not a student.
The synthesis. Everything you've built, applied. The week where the gap between what you hear and what you play finally closes.
“I'm retired and I started playing guitar in my retirement. So I've been learning songs here and there from different sources. But I never really could tie it together well. Maybe I don't even have a good practice regimen. So here I am, hoping that you can fix it all for me.”
Casper came in unsure. He could play songs. He couldn't tie it together. Six months later, he's a different player — the fretboard is his, and the Theory You Need section, which felt overwhelming at first, finally clicked. He went from "I never really could tie it together well" to playing through a 12-bar blues with intention and looking forward to soloing instead of avoiding it. This is what week 26 looks like for someone who started where you are.
Rotem is an internationally-touring jazz guitarist based in New York City. After 20 years on stages from Blue Note to North Sea, and five albums praised by The New York Times and DownBeat, he's spent the last few years building one thing: a 26-week curriculum for the adult guitarist who has been playing on and off for years and is finally ready to do it the right way. Half of his last cohort were doctors. The other half were career professionals giving themselves permission to take this seriously.
Same program. Same access. Same results. Just choose how you'd like to pay.
$1,197 over 26 weeks = $46 per week — less than a single private guitar lesson.
Live group mentorship calls run every other Wednesdayfor the full 26 weeks. Replays are posted in the student area for anyone who can't make it live.
Show up to the first live call. Do the first module. Submit your first video for feedback. If after 14 days you don't feel this is exactly what you needed to break through your plateau — email me at [email protected] for a complete refund. No forms, no hoops, no questions asked.
Six months are going to pass either way. You can spend them where you've been — collecting more YouTube playlists, half-finishing another course, wondering when you'll finally feel like you're getting somewhere. Or you can spend them on a path. With a teacher who'll watch you play. With a small group of fellow adults doing this with you. With a clear week-by-week plan that ends with you finally sounding like the musician you've been trying to become.