Self-taught
I know the online-learning maze because I lived in it. I also know the difference between collecting explanations and finally having a mental model that holds together.
SELF-TAUGHT → STAGE-TESTED → PROFESSOR-EXPLAINED
I learned guitarthe confusing way.You don’t have to.
I’m Cade Hagen: a self-taught professional guitarist, longtime performer, writer, and university English professor who is mildly obsessed with making difficult ideas feel concrete.
THE SHORT VERSION
From “guitarist” to musician.
I’ve spent twenty years teaching and playing onstage in Las Vegas. From biker bars to bougie casino clubs, churches to festivals, and weddings to funerals, I’ve performed roughly 500 songs in nearly every setting imaginable.
But for the first ten years, I boasted that I knew no theory and needed no theory. I specifically called myself a guitarist, not a musician. I had charts and tabs. Plus, this is music, man. Who needed all those rules?
The truth was less rebellious: I was scared. Like a lot of self-taught players, I thought theory was astrophysics and molecular biology’s terrifying love child.
But eventually, I got tired of feeling lost. Sure, if I followed the charts exactly, the song would sound great. But I had no CONTROL and, more importantly, no FREEDOM.
So I took the leap. The internet gave me a firehose of information, but the problem is I just needed a sip at a time, and in the right order. But I pushed through. I was a professor, after all. I knew how to scaffold information for my students; I just had to learn how to do it for myself.
And now that I’m on the other end (although there’s always PLENTY more to learn), I can’t believe how much more confident I feel, and more importantly, how much more FUN I’m having.
Now, I do the heavy lifting of scaffolding for you, and I deliver the result in a sneakily understandable way. It’s my honor and privilege to have helped millions of viewers get just a little more joy of their guitars.
After all, life is hard, so if you’re one of my comrades in guitarms, I’d love to help you, too.
Stage-tested
More than 1,500 hours making music with working musicians taught me what survives contact with a real song, a real band, and a real audience.
Professor-explained
A decade teaching university English sharpened my ability to sequence ideas, read confusion, and turn abstraction into language people can actually use.
“I focus on the whys behind music so you can learn songs more easily and, more importantly, compose and improvise with confidence.”See the Guitar JumpStart ↗