Guitar Mastery Intensive

[GuitarMastery]

Hey there,

Spencer here . I’m one of the founders here at Guitar Mastery Intensive. I want to provide a bit of context around who we are, and how our admissions process works for those who are curious.

So who are we? We are a team of about 25 lovely humans, a lot of the core team is based in the Bay Area, although a lot of our mentors are based in LA, NYC and Nashville as well. We have software engineers that build our accelerated learning software, an admissions team that processes applications and conducts interviews all day, every day, folks who do support/administration to make sure everybody has a great experience and our team of completely world class mentors.

At the time of writing this, we work in cohort sizes of about 40 students at a time. We’re a small team and our mentors only work with a handful of students each.

GMI isn’t a simple video course were you buy it and never finish it, it’s an intensive program in the truest sense. Our students are engaging with the program every single day. Students receive a lot of direct 1 on 1 attention. We give students custom practice plans every day, students submit videos of themselves playing nearly daily and receive detailed feedback from their mentor, we have weekly group classes with our head instructor Ila Cantor and students receive weekly lessons with their mentor to explore musical topics more in depth. As you can imagine, this is an incredible amount of work for our team and for that reason we can only take on students who will meet us half way, put in the work and get the results that we know are possible and have seen our best students achieve.

We only focus our energy on one type of student. We don’t work with beginners (there are tons of courses online for beginners) and we don’t work with extremely advanced players either. We do one thing and we do it exceptionally well, that is taking intermediate guitar players and bringing them to full fretboard fluency and expressiveness in a really streamlined and efficient way with an incredible amount of support and a super clear path.

For that reason we do conduct interviews for applicants. We receive hundreds of applications per week, way more than our team could possibly screen by hand, so first these applications go through a programmatic screening. It’s literally a bot I wrote that goes through the application tries to determine if the applicant is in the intermediate sweet spot. I wish we could screen every applicant by hand but it wouldn’t be possible.

If the application passes that programmatic step (which literally take a fraction of a second), they are permitted to book a time with one of our admissions counselors. That counselor reviews all of the applications they receive and screens the application again, if they determine that it won’t be a good fit, they cancel the interview appointment and reach out to the applicant to let them know and try to provide some good next steps for the applicant. This is a really tough process and we hate turning people away.

Next, the applicant gets on a call with one of our admissions counselors (who are some of my closest friends and the most caring and compassionate people I know), and they ask a series of questions to figure out where there might be gaps in the applicants knowledge. If they discover that the applicant is too beginner or too advanced for the program, they let them know and try to provide some good next steps to help them. If they happen to land in the intermediate sweet spot, where we can truly help them get unstuck from their plateau, the admissions counselor makes a call on their application and invites that applicant to join the program.

If the applicant decides to do it, they can take care of registration there on the call, which does include a deposit to lock in their spot. If they decide not to, it’s completely fine. We are very intentional about not pushing someone into doing something we don’t think they should do. I saw a previous commenter mentioning that they felt a bit pressured here and this was quite alarming for me. We’ve opened up a dialogue with our admissions team to ensure that this is never the case moving forward. My apologies to that commenter and thank you for that reflection so that we can learn and grow.

As for pricing, it does depend on the needs of the applicant. We can work out payment plans which are different in cost from paying up front. If the applicant is accepted and really wants to participate but is blocked by the cost, we have modifications that we can do to the core program to make it more cost effective such as reducing or removing mentor time, etc. In general, if an applicant is an awesome fit and we feel like they could really benefit from the program, we do everything in our power to make sure it’s accessible to them. Just come talk to us.

We also offer a need based scholarship for women and people of color. Guitar is notoriously a white male arena. There’s nothing wrong with white dudes playing guitar (Heck, I’m a white dude who plays guitar) but my cofounder Ila Cantor and I would love to see those scales tip in a big way, we would like to see more underrepresented folks gain access to a world class guitar education and we’re committed to making that possible. Not only is this desire built into our scholarship offerings, it is also reflected in our hiring process. We have been super intentional about making sure we have an equal number of men and women on our mentor staff working with students, so that everybody feels welcome and comfortable studying with Guitar Mastery Intensive.

As an aside, I want to apologize for the language around “Third world students”, I’m not sure how that particular word choice was made in your interview Carol, but I brought it to our team and we are treating it as a learning opportunity. That said, we would love to have (and have had) people from other countries participate in the program, especially those from the developing nations, and yes we would absolutely offer them a very generous scholarship if they needed it.

Addressing the comment about wanting to speak to previous alumni, that’s a totally sensible request but it’s not something we do. The reason is because it’s not very professional or respectful to our students to expect them to help sell our program. We don’t want them to be bombarded with dozen of messages from random strangers, that’s not their job. We are happy to speak at length about any questions you might have about the program and we have shared testimonials from our students on our website. Check them out here: https://www.guitarmasteryintensive.com/testimonials.


That’s all for now, I hope this helped clarify any lingering questions. If you resonate with what we’ve created and you’re excited to work with us, we’d love to hear from you. If any of you have further questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them, drop me an email at [email protected].

Happy Practicing Guitar Players!

Spencer Handley
Co-Founder
Guitar Mastery Intensive

[Kerbie]

Courtesy bump for new sponsor. Welcome.

[MaurysMusic]

Welcome to the AGF!