Let Me Tell You About My Guitar-Learning Journey
In the video above, I talk through my journey so you can understand the logic behind the guitar-learning experience that is Spytunes.
Most of my students over the years haven’t been complete beginners. Instead, they tend to be people who’ve played for a long time but hit a wall—then decide to give it another go, this time properly.
So I guess that’s my target audience. It’s where most people eventually end up, and with my own experience, I can really relate to the various pitfalls that come with learning guitar.
So, let me tell you about my journey. I started out playing classical guitar in school at the age of seven or eight—that’s when you typically start school in Sweden, where I’m from.
My first teacher was an older lady who taught simple classical pieces in a group setting.
After a few years, she was replaced by a younger guy who played pub gigs. He introduced me to the songbook—that’s lyrics and chords for popular songs, with no TAB or sheet music.
So I went from reading simple music on the stave to strumming chords above lyrics for songs I kind of recognised from the radio.
My parents weren’t musicians. They didn’t even have a record collection, so these weekly guitar lessons were all I had.
Nothing these two teachers gave me was particularly hard. Looking back, I was quite naive—I thought playing guitar was easy. But that’s only because I didn’t know any better. I was never really challenged.
This is actually a trick I’ve seen a lot of beginner teachers use. If you never push your students, they can stay at that same basic level—and you’ve got a reliable weekly income for years.
So this went on for about four or five years. I made very little progress—but I suppose I enjoyed it.
My First Electric Guitar Lessons
At 12, I started taking electric guitar lessons from a private teacher. He was your typical working musician—played in a wedding band and taught students on the side.
He’d been to MI in Los Angeles and had actually shared a flat with a guy called Frank Gambale. Maybe you’ve heard of him? He came up with a speed-picking method during that time, so naturally, we worked on that for a while.
We also practised modes and worked on solos—pretty standard stuff for a once-a-week guitar lesson in the late ’80s.
Looking back, the main thing that was missing was context. We didn’t play full songs or work on material that related to songs—it was all quite disjointed. I didn’t listen to much music either. Mostly, I just ran through exercises.
I could blaze through those three-notes-per-string patterns Gambale had developed, but I didn’t know how to apply them in a musical context. I did have a garage band with some mates, but my solos never really fit the songs we were playing. They were fast and loud—but didn’t work.
If I went into a music shop to try out an amp, I probably sounded pretty decent. But if you’d dropped me into a real band situation, I would’ve sounded like a beginner.
Because I didn’t understand enough about music, and didn’t play enough with the band, I wasn’t really aware of my own level. I thought I was a lot better than I actually was.
This is something I still see in a lot of players today. They’ve got decent technique and on the surface it seems like they’re good—but without real-world context or band experience, they disappear in a group setting. That is, until it’s time to solo—then it’s all too loud, too fast… exactly like I used to be.
This went on for another four or five years, until I finished school. At 16, I went off to college.
First Music College
I found a music college—one of those rock-pop places that started to spring up in the mid-’90s.
Here, I had a teacher who was into jazz. He tuned his guitar in 4ths to make his scales more symmetrical and played a double-neck guitar—fretting chords with his left hand on the top neck while tapping melodies with his right hand on the bottom.
This was about as far removed from The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as you could possibly get.
I spent three years studying with him—Matthias Windemo—mostly working on modes and licks from his favourite players, Pat Metheny and George Benson.
We’d do things like spend an entire lesson improvising using Lydian, or try free improvisation with no harmonic rules at all.
It was way too advanced for me. I could just about keep up, but really, I should’ve been playing much simpler things first, getting those down before jumping into this kind of material.
Again, I see this a lot with young players these days—they’re working on things they don’t fully understand and can just about get away with.
But put them in a real-world scenario and it quickly falls apart. Rhythm playing in particular tends to be a disaster.
Early Years as a Professional Musician
After college, I was 18 or 19 and realised I needed real-world experience, so I started gigging—bars, tourist resorts around Europe, cruise ships—you name it. Summers in Greece, winters in the Alps, and cruise ships in between. Most of this was duo work: acoustic guitar and vocals.
I knew I had to make up for not knowing enough actual songs—I desperately needed that kind of hands-on experience.
And in many ways, it was great. It gave me context. But I also missed out on a few vital things.
Because I was the one singing, bringing the PA, booking the gigs, chatting to the audience, collecting the money, driving the car, and negotiating the next booking, the actual guitar playing became the last thing on my mind.
That was a huge mistake. I really wish someone had pointed it out to me at the time—it would have made such a difference.
What I needed to hear was: Stop singing. Focus on your playing. Practise during the day what you’re playing at night. Work on developing your parts.
If I’d done that, I could have kept gigging and gradually improved.
What I’ve since learned is that every musician who gets good does so by focusing on their playing. They gig, they practise what they play, and—crucially—they don’t do much else.
As soon as they get distracted and lose focus, their development stalls, even if they’re gigging three nights a week.
I’ve met so many musicians over the last thirty years, and every single one who became great followed the same pattern. They gig. They practise. They work on their repertoire. They focus on playing what they played yesterday, only better.
Around this time, I also had an original band with a guy called Christer. He wrote the songs, and I put the band together. We recorded some great tracks—but back then, I didn’t realise just how good they were (you can hear one of them below).
In the end, I couldn’t get that band off the ground, and the bar gigs weren’t going anywhere either. I got distracted. After six or seven years of gigging, I decided to head back to music school—this time in England.
Second Music College
After a few years of gigging, I decided to return to another rock-pop music college, this time at BIMM. Here, I met what I can only describe as the best guitar player—and probably teacher—on the planet.
You’ve probably heard of him: the incredible Guthrie Govan.
This guy is so good, it’s genuinely mind-blowing. I spent three years with him, and aside from constantly being amazed, I came to realise that the main issue with guitar lessons isn’t the student’s ambition or the teacher’s ability; it’s the format.
Guthrie has an answer to every question you could possibly ask. Want to know how to play like Jimi Hendrix? Simple: “It’s just like this”, and then, boom, note for note, it sounds exactly the same!
Any detailed question you have, he knows it, and he tells you right away.
There’s no pause, no hesitation—he just knows the answer.
What about Allan Holdsworth’s approach? “Oh, it’s just this…” To be in the same room as Guthrie, being able to ask him anything, was quite the experience.
But here’s the thing: after the lesson ends, you’re left with an impossible question: Where do I start? And what was that thing he said about Allan Holdsworth’s scale pattern again?
It wasn’t long before I realised I had to sit down, figure out what I was actually going to focus on, and create a practice routine. I had to stop overthinking and, as Nike says, Just Do It.
The CAGED System + John Mehegan: Tonal and Rhythmical Principles
It’s 2003, three years after The CAGED Guitarist book had been released, and suddenly, everyone was talking about it. While few actually read the book, everyone acted as if they understood it.
When I finally found the book and dug into it, I realised that all the CAGED system really meant was that instead of referring to positions 1-5, we simply used the CAGED names for them. It may seem like a small thing, but it was truly revolutionary.
Coming from Sweden and being bilingual, with a lot of English around me, I began to understand just how important language is in shaping thought. Thinking in English, I realised how much more powerful it is to think in terms of a C-shaped chord rather than just thinking of it as “position 3.” It’s all about language. That shift in thinking was a key moment for me in understanding why the CAGED system is so crucial.
Around the same time, I also discovered a book called Tonal and Rhythmical Principles by jazz piano professor John Mehegan. By combining the insights from these two books, I developed a practice routine that eventually led to the creation of my Self Elimination Practice Routine (SEPR) and Chordacus.
I presented this developed CAGED and Roman numeral system to the college, along with a set of chromatic exercises I had created, inspired by drummers’ rudiments. You can find these exercises in the SEPR on the member’s site.
The result? They offered me a teaching position. I rewrote their guitar curriculum based on the CAGED system and began teaching a few days a week during my second and third years as a student. I also started writing a column for Guitar Techniques Magazine.
This was a huge turning point for me. My playing improved dramatically now that I had names for my chord and scale shapes, and I truly understood chord theory through Roman numerals. Playing in several bands also gave me the crucial context I had been missing.
Writing songs with these bands became surprisingly easy now that I could navigate the fretboard with confidence. I could develop melodies, reharmonise them, or manipulate rhythms. It was as if everything had finally clicked into place.
But there was still one issue: the format of the face-to-face lessons.
Even with someone as extraordinary as Guthrie Govan, two major elements were missing.
The first was that you couldn’t re-watch the lessons, since they were live.
The second was that, with Guthrie answering any question, and 30 other students all in the same room, there was no clear structure to the lessons. With so many questions being thrown around, the course format could have been more effective. And again, not being able to revisit the lesson was a huge drawback. Don’t get me wrong, it was incredibly entertaining, and I’m deeply grateful to have been his student—he’s amazing.
This experience led me to realise that the college needed to film the lessons and offer them as a video library for future students.
In 2005, just before YouTube became a thing, I recognised the potential of video lessons. Streaming was costly, and the college I was at wasn’t keen on using computers. So, I left, found an investor, and launched my first company in 2006 to provide video guitar lessons.
Around the same time, I was also part of an original band. We recorded a song I co-wrote and played on (the band eventually broke up, as they often do, due to internal conflicts).
Going online
After that significant investment, we built a film and recording studio, hired editors, engineers, writers, and even had a receptionist answering the phone. There were far too many board meetings with a group of chaotic directors, and after about a year, the company fell apart. The website shut down only a few months after launch.
The main issue was that streaming, at that time, was far too expensive. I think it cost around $5 per gigabyte, which is an insane difference when you consider how it’s now less than a cent. It was the right idea, but definitely the wrong time.
In 2007, the following year, I thought, “This is crunch time.” If I was ever going to make progress with teaching, I had to get serious. So, I launched Spytunes, uploaded all my song videos to YouTube, and wrote several books on my scale theories and practice routines, believing that the diversity of the songs would demonstrate that these scale and chord theories could work for any genre.
At first, it was just me, Justin, and a couple of Australian guys called Next-Level Guitar on YouTube.
My videos quickly gained millions of views, and the traffic to the site was great. As a result, I sold plenty of books, and it seemed like everything was falling into place.
I then expanded, recording songs by Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin, but this led to a copyright issue with YouTube. They shut down my account because of the content, and although I uploaded the remaining songs to new accounts, the momentum was gone, and the traffic never quite returned to its previous level.
By 2009, I had joined a band playing bass, we secured a record deal, and Spytunes went into hibernation.
Here’s the best tune we recorded. I wrote the horn riff and played bass on this track, although I wasn’t credited.
Finding Focus and Context
I never got paid for my Spytunes YouTube videos, since all the ad revenue went straight to the copyright holders. My eBooks are now being shared via emails and forums, but, to be honest, I’m way too busy to care about it anymore.
At that time, I was touring with my band. We were supporting big-name acts like Sting, The Hoosiers, The Script, Paolo Nutini, and Girls Aloud. We were playing festivals, making music videos, going to photo shoots—all convinced we were on the verge of making it.
A few years later, the band was dropped by the label, and I found myself back playing weddings, once again thinking about how I could make Spytunes work.
If I was going to try again, I knew I had to get everything right this time.
During this period, I had a bunch of superfans, most of whom were focused on the SEPR. They were great at playing scales, but struggled with putting them into a real-world context.
It reminded me of when I learned Frank Gambale’s three-note-per-string patterns. They’d practice these patterns, but without the context that makes them useful.
I’d like to think that Chordacus is a step ahead of those three-note-per-string patterns, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.
Even though my scale patterns and music theory ideas were the foundation for me going online, I eventually realised something was missing, something I’d seen in my own development as a teacher. The missing piece was context.
It became clear that the answer had been there all along, right in the name of the website—Spytunes: study songs.
If I was going to give it another go, I knew I had to get everything right this time: the format, the streaming, the context, the payments, the copyright…and the focus.
Let me tell you one last story that really taught me the importance of focus and success. I was in another original band, and once again, we came close to making it. But, as always, internal conflict reared its ugly head, and the band broke up before things ever took off. Here’s a tune I co-wrote and played on.
Lessons Learned from Passion and Dedication in the Music Industry
I spent 2012–2018 refining the structure of my courses, continually writing and rewriting material to ensure the exercises and chord theories were seamlessly integrated with the songs. Alongside this, I performed at events with soul bands and had an original rock band. We recorded an album and toured for a few years, but as with most bands, internal conflict eventually led to its collapse.
One of our more memorable tours was with a truly bizarre band. Backed by a billionaire, they flew in famous musicians and jetted between gigs on private planes. Among them was the bass player from Whitesnake, the drummer from Ozzy Osbourne’s band, and the billionaire’s son on guitar—who, honestly, seemed completely out of place.
We toured together for several weeks, and during this time, I had the chance to watch their guitarist, Richard. Although I’d never seen him before, his skill was extraordinary. The songs he was playing were nothing to write home about, but Richard poured his heart into every note. Every performance felt as though his life depended on it, even though he knew this project was doomed to fail the moment the billionaire lost interest.
Richard’s setup was impressive: a custom-made 100-watt amp that out-powered the PA, surrounded by a collection of incredible guitars. But what struck me most was his dedication. Even on a Tuesday night in Sunderland, with only 200 tickets sold for a 500-capacity venue, he performed as though the crowd was a sell-out.
I stood there, watching him, captivated by the sheer passion and professionalism he brought to a project most would consider a dead end. It was a lesson in what it takes to succeed—focus, dedication, and giving everything, no matter the circumstances.
The Final Lesson: Giving 100% to Every Note
So why am I telling you all this? Well, just two months later, Richard Fortus—the guitarist I had watched pour everything into his playing—joined the biggest rock band in the world for their reunion tour. Yes, Richard Fortus became part of Guns N’ Roses.
It turns out Richard had been with Guns N’ Roses when Axl Rose was doing the band on his own. Now, imagine how many guitar players would dream of getting that gig. The original lineup, minus Izzy Stradlin, had their pick from the world’s top guitarists, and yet they chose Richard.
What Richard taught me here, and what I believe is the final piece of the puzzle, is this: it doesn’t matter what song you’re playing, you need to give it 100%. Every note counts. Excuses are for amateurs.
So, in 2019, I started rebuilding everything I had learned and built up to this point. What you see now is the result: a step-by-step program with no homework, 24/7 access so we can practice together.
The focus is simple: learn from the songs, play along with loops for each section, and pay great attention to every note. Develop parts and actually play these songs in their entirety.
My goal is to help you build great habits from the start and avoid the same pitfalls I fell into. I want you to learn the guitar in a way that doesn’t take decades. I want you out there making music with others, writing songs, and most importantly, having fun.
It doesn’t have to be difficult. All you need is to get on the right track and stay there.
All you have to do is focus and learn from every song you play.
I hope to help you on this journey with my guitar lessons and courses.
Dan Lundholm
Dan Lundholm | Related pages
Songbook A-Z
As a guitarist, your repertoire is one of the greatest assets you can acquire. It’s your gateway to playing with other musicians.
To make it easier for you, I’ve compiled a comprehensive Songbook featuring tunes you can play in various settings:
From acoustic duos to jazz trios, indie/rock/pop bands, and funk/soul/Motown ensembles.
Artists & Bands
Behind every song you learn, there’s an artist or band with an entire catalogue of music waiting to be discovered.
Explore these incredible artists and bands, and let their tunes guide you on your musical journey.
Chordacus
Spytunes’ Chordacus is a refined version of the CAGED system, designed to help you master chords, scales, and arpeggios.
Available both in chromatic form (original version) and “within a key,” Chordacus was developed with the assistance of a dedicated Spytunes student.
Ebooks
Before the step-by-step courses, Spytunes offered a series of eBooks focused on various aspects of guitar playing.
Now, when you become a member, you’ll have access to these eBooks as part of The Spytunes Method, a comprehensive reference manual to aid your development.
Guitar Chords
The CAGED system is the best way to understand the guitar fretboard and master guitar chords.
First introduced by Paul Foad in 2000, this revolutionary concept has transformed the way guitarists approach chord construction.
Once understood, you can build any chord, arpeggio, or mode.
