Expand upon difficulty level for songs - required skillset

One of the things I love about this website is the HUGE selection of great songs with full lessons and breakdowns. The selection is becoming SO large, that it's more difficult to filter.

It's great that the song list can be filtered by popularity, newness, genre, artist, instructor, etc. I think it would be very helpful if you could filter songs based on required skills. The difficulty indicator is very subjective and can be perceived as inaccurate. There are "4 guitar" songs I can learn with relative ease and there are "3 guitar" songs that I struggle with. This is because the "3 guitar" song may feature a skill I'm not strong with yet.

By being able to sort and filter this way, the user could find songs that are easy FOR THEM to learn. It would also allow a user to find songs to help them work on a particular skill. I can pick out some of this on my own, but I'm not intimately familiar with many of the songs on the list.

This would help the song list be used in a way a private instructor would. In my experience with a private instructor, I would learn a particular skill and we would come up with a song that was appropriate for my skill level that would contain playing requiring the new skill, perhaps even emphasize it. It could also go the other way - I would say I want to learn a particular song and we'd start by him teaching me the required skills. When we worked on the solos from "Comfortably Numb", I realized my bending skills weren't quite what I thought they were :-)...so we worked on that.

As an example, a "skill" list to describe a song could be:
Barre Chords
Open Chords
Power Chords
Double Stops
Finger Picking
Hybrid Picking
Bends
Pinch Harmonics
Tapping
Legato
Sweep Picking
Alternate Picking
...

You could even grade the song for each skill as to how much the song requires it. "Dust in the Wind" would score very high on the fingerpicking skill, whereas "Something" by the Beatles would score low on it since it's a very small part of the song. "Cowboys from Hell" wouldn't include the fingerpicking skill at all, but would require skills the previously mentioned songs don't require. You probably get the idea.

I realize this would require a lot of analysis of the song library, but I think it would be worth it and provide additional value to this great list of songs.

Rich Maggio

This is a great idea! This would be beneficial in so many ways for all users.

Great suggestion Rich!

JJ

that sounds like it would be helpful in picking out song to learn to me

I love this idea! You're correct in that it would require analysis of our library and possibly some tweaks to our search and filtering engines, but I definitely can see the value. I'll pass this along to the team. Thanks!

James
GT Admin